Exam #2 Remarks and Observations
(Last Mod: 27 November 2010 21:38:41 )
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Scores ranged from a 48 to a 104 - right at five points higher than the min/max for Exam 1. The mean, median, and mode were almost exactly the same as the first exam. A review of the grade distribution shows that the wide gap that existed on Exam 1 has largely vanished - but for the most part it appears to be due to people that did very well on the first exam only doing very solidly on this exam. However, it does also appear that many of the people that did "okay" on the first exam improved on this exam at least moderately.
I mentioned after I handed out the exam to be sure to put your name on the exam and to circle your section number. For those people that couldn't do that, you lost a point.
| Metric | Overall |
| Mean | 71.3 |
| Median | 71.0 |
| Mode | 71.0 |
Overall Performance (on multiple choice)
| Metric | Overall |
| Mean (% correct) | 68 |
| Median (missed) | 6 |
| Mode (missed) | 5 |
Number of people that had a given number of questions wrong
| Missed | Count |
| 0 | 1 |
| 1 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | 1 |
| 4 | 1 |
| 5 | 3 |
| 6 | 2 |
| 7 | 2 |
| 8 | 1 |
| 9 | 2 |
| 10 | 1 |
| 11 | |
| 12 | 1 |
Number of people that missed a given question
The questions in brackets were missed by more than one-third of the students. You can count on these questions, or questions that address the same concept, being on a later exam.
| Q | count | Q | count |
| 1 | 3 | 11 | 3 |
| 2 | 4 | 12 | [6] |
| 3 | 1 | 13 | 2 |
| 4 | 3 | 14 | [13] |
| 5 | 3 | 15 | [8] |
| 6 | 4 | 16 | [7] |
| 7 | 2 | 17 | [9] |
| 8 | [6] | 18 | 3 |
| 9 | [8] | 19 | 3 |
| 10 | 3 | 20 | 5 |
21) More than a third of the class lost points on this problem. There's not a lot I can say. You need to know how to evaluate expressions.
22) This was intended to be a "gimme" and for the vast majority of people it was. If you don't know by now that uninitialized variables have no specific, known value then you need to learn that fast.
23) As on the first exam, I was looking for mainly "divide and conquer". Yet nearly a third of the class lost points on this problem. Makes me wonder how you are approaching you homework....
24) As with a some of the later problems, many of the points lost were simply due to people not being willing to read the question. If asked to "Show a code fragment" and you don't show a code fragment, expect to lose points.
25) A lot of very interesting variations, most of which tell me that many of you are making no effort to use macros in your homework. You are going to have a very hard time learning any skill if you don't practice it. Most people, but not all, made an effort to use the two "golden rules", so I was happy to see that. A couple of people just decided to memorize the problem from the review sheet and regurgitate it on the exam even though the problem was not the same. You need to get out of the mode where you want to memorize equations and throw them at a problem with no effort to understand what the equation means or how to use it.
26) Straight from the review sheet. Many of the attempted solutions were so far off that it was obvious that no effort had been made to actually work the problems on the review sheet, write the code, and test it. If you insist on throwing away the opportunity know that you know how to work a potential exam problem, then that's a choice you've made. On at least two occasions this semester, I used this as an example in class. I pointed out explicitly that you can't use the notion of repeated multiplication when the exponent isn't required to be an integer. I've commented that you have to be comfortable with working with exponentials and logarithms. The language of engineering is mathematics - either choose to get fluent or seriously consider non-engineering alternatives.
27) Straight from the review sheet. And one-fourth of the class chose not to even attempt it. Again, it's your choice.
28) Straight from the review sheet. Worked a couple of times in class. Quite a few people write a main() function and got input from the user and printed things out - none of which was asked for. Quite a few people didn't bother to read the entire question and missed the last sentence - even though I pointed it out during the exam.
29) This one revealed a number of people who I would be willing to bet have yet to write many, if any, programs in this course.
30) At least a little over half of the class made some kind of an attempt on this - and about 20% apparently actually wrote and tested the code.