![[topimage]](IMADA_en.png)
As all elective courses, this course is taught on an irregular schedule. Thus, you cannot rely on it running again next year. This is important wrt. possible reexam dates, should you need that. The first oral reexam will be held in the February/March reexam period, and your final attempt can be used the following summer. Specific dates will be announced later for the oral exam as well as for the project, which will have deadline some time earlier than the date for the oral exam.There are two exam elements in this course:
- an oral exam, and
- a programming project.
Programming project
The programming project is in multiple parts with deadlines through the semester such that it is completed around the end of teaching.| Exam Project | Deadline |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | |
| Project description | Sunday, October 20, 2024, at 23:59 |
| Part 2 | |
| Project description | Sunday, December 8, 2024, at 23:59 |
Oral exam
This exam is scheduled for Thursday and Friday, January 9-10, 2025.We may end up only using one of these days.
More information will follow later regarding sequence and room allocation.
Procedure
The examination form is oral exam with preparation. When it is your turn for examination, you will draw a question. The list of questions can be found below. Then you will be placed alone in a preparation room. You will have approximately 25-30 minutes of preparation time and you are allowed to use any material that you are bringing yourself, excluding communication devices and so-called AI tools which include generative transformers such as ChatGPT and many others; SDU does not allow you to use such aids for exams.After the preparation time, the actual exam takes place. This part also lasts approximately 25-30 minutes. You should start by presenting material related to the question you drew. Aim for a reasonably high pace and focus on the most interesting material related to the question. You may bring a short list of keywords for the actual exam to remember what you have decided to present. Thus, you are not supposed to use note material, textbooks, transparencies, computer, etc. for this part.
We, the examiner and the censor, will supplement with specific questions when appropriate, and after a while, we will end the discussion of the exam question that you drew and turn to material from other parts of the curriculum. Note that all of this as well as discussions between examiner and censor about the grade is included in the 25-30 minutes, so you have about 12-13 minutes for your own presentation.
Most of the questions below cover a whole lecture or more, so you will have to choose what to cover. You will of course also be evaluated based on your selection of material. If you only present the simplest material, you limit the grade you can obtain. On the other hand, a good presentation of the simple material is better than a poor presentation of the harder material. For most questions, it is natural to first sketch the algorithm or data structure and then present essential elements of the analysis. In most cases, a complete treatment of the analysis is the harder part of the question, but will therefore also enable you to demonstrate the best understanding of the material. Notice that some chapters in the textbook start with some motivating example. Don't spend too much (or any) time on those. It is the core algorithms and data structures we would like to hear about.
Further Advice for an Oral Exam
- You may choose to carry out the exam in Danish or English. This is primarily for the benefit of exchange students or other students with limited Danish skills. However, I see more and more Danish students who choose to use English. I think it's because they think they are pretty good at English and think it's a problem that they don't know all the Danish words for concepts in the curriculum because the course was taught in English. I understand that reasoning, but my experience is that it's not to the students' advantage. It would be better for almost all Danish students to keep it in Danish and then just use the English word for concepts where they don't know the Danish term. There will be no punishment for such mixed Danish/English performances.
- You have little time compared with a lecture, so speed is important. Don't try to imitate my calm speed when I lecture. I spend time setting the scene, mentioning topics from earlier courses and applications, and I go through the material slowly because you haven't seen it before. When you cover a topic, you should not necessarily start from the beginning of a chapter and see how far you get. Instead, go much more directly to the algorithms and the analyses and go through arguments much faster than I do in a lecture. Of course, there are limits; we should be able to understand what you are saying. Don't use the blackboard for sentences; use it for illustrations, formulas, and deductions.
- On the same note, don't stall. Some students behave like they think they enter with a 12 and then just want to drag out the time, so they don't say anything wrong. That's not how it is. You enter with nothing. Whenever you convince us that there is something non-trivial you can do correctly, your grade increases. If you stall or make wild guesses to questions where you don't know the answer, the time you spent on that comes out of the time you have to explain something correctly. Of course it reflects negatively on you if there are topics where you don't know the material. However, then it's all the more important to move on and demonstrate that you know other parts of the curriculum.
- Before the exam day, you need to write down for each question what you want to cover and how. These notes will be useful for you during the preparation time. In other words, you should already be prepared before the preparation time; the preparation time is basically for memorizing the flow of the arguments in your presentation. It's not that we're big fans of memorization; it's just hard to give any credit for someone reading aloud from a manuscript that could have been produced by another student. In principle, the notes you use during your preparation time could have been produced by someone else, but we will discover this quickly if this means that you don't understand the material.
- Try not to panic. I will of course check to see if there are parts you don't know, but many of my questions are meant as a help. If you say something incorrect or unclear, but I think you know it, then I may ask a question so you get a chance to correct. If you get stuck, I will try to ask a question or give you a hint that will enable you to proceed. So, listen to my questions and be cooperative. I really want you to pass!
- When you have decided what you want to say for each of the questions I have announced, remember to read up on the entire curriculum. After your presentation, we will ask questions in the entire course material. Those questions will be rather specific, and we expect a fairly direct answer. In other words, we don't want to hear a presentation from the beginning just because the question falls in a topic you have also prepared a presentation for.
- Place your list of keywords on the table. If you hold it in your hand, you will - if you're like most people - look at it whenever we ask a question. And even though the answer is basically never on your piece of paper, it doesn't look so convincing. An appropriate number of times to check your paper is 5-10 times. Holding it in you hand all the time to copy sequences on inequalities or other things just shows that you can copy something someone wrote on paper to the blackboard. And we're not interested in just getting a sequence of, say, inequalities up on the blackboard. We want to be told why each inequality holds. Thus, it's the steps of an argumentation that are important, i.e., how one gets from one statement to another.
Curriculum
TBA - it will essentially be all parts of the book and weekly notes that we have covered in the lectures and exercises.Questions
TBA - likely almost one question per lecture topic.