Exams Overview

Two take-home exams will be given throughout the term. Tentatively, the exams are scheduled for:

  • Exam 1, Friday 3/3 (Week 6)
  • Exam 2, Friday 4/21 (Week 11) Wednesday 4/26 (Week 12) This date is VERY tentative, and will be discussed further in class

Changes to exam dates will be announced at least 2 weeks prior to the scheduled time.

Take-home exams will be posted by 5pm on Friday of the exam day and due by 11:59pm the following Monday. They are intended to take between 3 and 4 hours to complete and allow reference to course notes and the textbook. No homework will be assigned in the week leading up to the exam. Except in the case of illness or emergency, requests to reschedule take-home exam must be made a week before the exam.

Midterm Exam 1 Information

The first midterm exam will be a take-home exam which will be made available in the Midterm 1 folder under the documents section of PWeb at 5pm on Friday, March 3rd and due at 11:59pm (uploaded to Gradescope) on Monday, March 6th.

Content

The exam will cover Chapter 7 (7.1 - 7.6) and parts of Chapter 8 (8.1 - 8.3, 8.6) of DeGroot and Schervish’s Probability and Statistics. There will be some questions that ask you to use R.

Format

The exam is intended to take \(2.5\) hours to complete, although you may take up to \(4\) hours to complete it. These 4 hours do not need to be consecutive. You should monitor your own time, and record on the test your estimate for the total amount of time you actively worked on the exam.

Your solutions to the exam should be neatly neatly written or typed. If you scan a handwritten assignment, be sure to review the legibility of your scan on Gradescope after you submit.

Resources

You may use any notes you’ve taken for this class, your work on any previous homework or daily assignments, lecture notes I’ve posted on the course website, the recorded lecture video from Monday 2/20 and DeGroot and Schervish’s textbook, as well as Blitzstein’s Introduction to Probability textbook.\

For problems asking you to do analysis or perform computations using R, you may use either a local installation of R or the Grinnell R Studio server, and you may reference any of the R help files (available by typing \(\texttt{?functionname}\) in the console).

You may also use WolframAlpha, Maple, Mathematica, or Symbolab to assist with calculating integrals, derivatives, or algebraic simplification. If you use technology to assist calculating, please clearly reference the cite you used to assist you, and write down the explicit expression / code you input.

You may not use any other resources other than those listed above. If you have questions about whether a resource can be used, you are welcome to message me.

Preparation

The best preparation you can do for the exam is to organize your notes and/or homework to make finding information and examples as quick and efficient as possible. Beyond that, you should attempt to accurately assess what topics you have mastered and which you need to practice more. A good starting point is to review the list of objectives on each daily assignment. Another way to prepare is to create your own study guide with summaries of the important concepts, along with example problems you’ve designed and solved. Exam problems will be comparable in difficulty to those exhibited in class and assigned for homework. Some exam questions may be similar to problems you have seen before, while others will require you to synthesize your knowledge in new ways.

Review Problems

For extra practice, several additional review problems (along with their solutions) are printed in the .pdf linked below. While these questions are representative of the typical scope and difficulty of individual exam questions, this review is not comprehensive, nor does it necessarily represent the total amount of time available for the exam.


Midterm Exam 2 Information

The first midterm exam will be a take-home exam which will be made available in the Midterm 2 folder under the documents section of PWeb at 9am on Wednesday, April 26th and due at 11:59pm (uploaded to Gradescope) on Wednesday, May 3rd.

Content

The exam will be lightly cumulative, but with emphasis on the material covered since the first midterm. In particular, it will focus on Chapter 8 (8.4, 8.5), Chapter 9 (9.1, 9.5, 9.6, 9.7) and Section 12.6 of DeGroot and Schervish’s Probability and Statistics. There will be some questions that ask you to use R.

Format

The exam is intended to take \(3\) hours to complete, although you may take up to \(5\) hours to complete it. These \(5\) hours do not need to be consecutive. You should monitor your own time, and record on the test your estimate for the total amount of time you actively worked on the exam.

Your solutions to the exam should be neatly neatly written or typed. If you scan a handwritten assignment, be sure to review the legibility of your scan on Gradescope after you submit.

Resources

You may use any notes you’ve taken for this class, your work on any previous homework or daily assignments, lecture notes I’ve posted on the course website, the recorded lecture video from Monday 2/20 and DeGroot and Schervish’s textbook, as well as Blitzstein’s Introduction to Probability textbook.\

For problems asking you to do analysis or perform computations using R, you may use either a local installation of R or the Grinnell R Studio server, and you may reference any of the R help files (available by typing \(\texttt{?functionname}\) in the console).

You may also use WolframAlpha, Maple, Mathematica, or Symbolab to assist with calculating integrals, derivatives, or algebraic simplification. If you use technology to assist calculating, please clearly reference the cite you used to assist you, and write down the explicit expression / code you input.

You may not use any other resources other than those listed above. If you have questions about whether a resource can be used, you are welcome to message me.

Preparation

The best preparation you can do for the exam is to organize your notes and/or homework to make finding information and examples as quick and efficient as possible. Beyond that, you should attempt to accurately assess what topics you have mastered and which you need to practice more. A good starting point is to review the list of objectives on each daily assignment. Another way to prepare is to create your own study guide with summaries of the important concepts, along with example problems you’ve designed and solved. Exam problems will be comparable in difficulty to those exhibited in class and assigned for homework. Some exam questions may be similar to problems you have seen before, while others will require you to synthesize your knowledge in new ways.

Review Problems

For extra practice, several additional review problems (along with their solutions) are printed in the .pdf linked below. While these questions are representative of the typical scope and difficulty of individual exam questions, this review is not comprehensive, nor does it necessarily represent the total amount of time available for the exam.