Important Notice Regarding Reexams

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 August reexam period, and your final attempt can be used in the following Winter period. 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.

You get one combined grade based on the two parts. The oral exam has highest weight.

Programming project

The programming project is in multiple parts with deadlines through the semester such that it is completed around the end of teaching.

The project parts will be announced here later. They will focus on implementing and testing some of the algorithms from the course, while leaving some or even significant space for your own choices, if you would like that.

Oral exam

More information on time and place will follow.

Procedure

The examination form is oral exam without preparation time. A list of questions^[1] you might be asked can be found below.

The exam lasts approximately 20 minutes. You'll be in front of the blackboard and you can use that. You will be asked several questions in a variety of topics. You are supposed to answer as directly as possible.

Course relevant examples will appear here later.

Thus, the set-up is aimed for a reasonably high pace and focus, so we can discuss several topics. We, the examiner and the censor, will supplement with specific questions when appropriate.

At the end of the course, there will be lots of example questions below and we don't expect photographic memorization of all details and notation. The focus is on understanding and the ability to explain why results hold.

Our selection of questions is online and will depend on how you've handled earlier questions. To illustrate this, in the extreme cases, if you handled one of the easier questions very convincingly, we may proceed with a harder one, and if that also goes well, we'll probably continue with only harder questions to see if the grade should be 10 or 12. On the other hand, if things did not start out well, we may at some point just try for easier questions to see if the grade should be 00, 02, or 4.

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.
• The following is mostly relevant for the more involved harder questions. 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, 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 (and mostly not for text in general); 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 works. 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.
• You cannot use notes during the examination. We cannot give credit for something you read from a piece of paper that someone/something has prepared. Again, we're not big fans of memorization, but there is simply not time for obtaining enough information for giving a grade if we have to discard statements that you've just read from a piece of paper. On the positive side, we're very forgiving wrt. notation, names of things, etc. We're only interested in the understanding. We realize of course that you have to remember something in order to convey your understanding, but it's much easier to remember how an algorithm that you have understood works or what a proof you have understood depends on than it is to remember concrete notation. For example, we're not interested in whether you can write up a sequence of inequalities as they appear in the book. We are interested in why each inequality holds. And that can often be explained, even if the notation is not perfect, and sometimes even without writing the inequality up.
• Try not to panic. I will of course check to see if there are parts of the curriculum 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 or clarify. 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!

Curriculum

TBA - it will essentially be all parts of the book and weekly notes that we have covered in the lectures and exercises.

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1. ^ Just to avoid confusion: Danes normally refer to discussion points that you can encounter at an oral exam as questions, so I use that terminology as well. But you are not really asked a question; you're are given a topic or (polite) order of something you should tell us about.

 

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