SLOG Post #3 - Term Test

Note: According to the course website, this blog post was supposed to discuss tracing recursive functions, but I did that last week so I decided to talk about the test instead.

This week we had our first CSC148 midterm test. I was pretty worried about it because I wasn't sure what kind of questions would be on it, as all of the past tests that we were given had been written later in the semester than we were writing ours, and they focused on topics that we hadn't covered yet. I studied by going through all of the lectures and course notes, and by re-doing the labs. I also did some of the extra practice questions that were assigned with the labs. I found these questions to be quite difficult, especially the Reverse Polish Notation question from the Lab 1 and Lab 2 problem set. Because the questions didn't come with answers, it was difficult to determine if I was answering the questions correctly. I nonetheless think they helped me a lot.

I was pleased with how the test went and I think that I was very well prepared. There were three major questions: one on creating a class, one on tracing recursion, and one on implementing subclasses for an abstract class. I had been worried that there would be a question where we would need to create a class from scratch and implement all of its methods, but luckily there wasn't. The test was quite long for a 50-minute writing period, and I finished just on time. It was one of those tests where if you spent too long thinking about a question, or if you did something wrong and had to go back and re-do it, you would likely not finish on time. That is why I was really glad that I had studied well: for each question, I knew almost immediately what I needed to do. The "cheat sheet" was also a big help: even though I already knew most of what I wrote on the sheet, it was really helpful to see it right in front of you.

I think my studying method was pretty effective (if anything, I feel that I over-studied)!  I would definitely use a similar approach for our next test.