Final Exam

Final Exam Results
Here are the stats:

• exam was worth 100 points
• average score: 89
• standard deviation: 6.44
• median: 91

So, overall quite a good exam. If you want to check your answers, here's the final exam answers: 2009 Exam Answers. The extra credit question was, in my judgement, answered correctly by 12 people. top answers were:

• 8 people: Speed (1994) - bus drives down under-construction Century Freeway in LA
• 2 people: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - British POW oversees bridge construction for Burma-Siam railway
• 1 person: Blues Brothers (1980) - car hurtles off the end of an infinished freeway
• 1 person: Tremors (1990) - jackhammering releases the worm

Exam Preparation
The final exam counts 30% towards your final grade. It's also a good idea to review the discussion board before the final. As usual, anything covered in class or in the readings is fair game. Some basic facts about the final:

• Format. The final will be open-book, open-notes. The final will be comprehensive: it covers everything in class (including guest speakers), the readings and the homework. Yes, I know there is a lot of reading.
• Question types. There will be at least two pages of true/false, multiple choice, short answer and short calculation problems. There will also be several short essay questions that will require you to think more deeply, come up with a plan and then express that plan in concise, clear language. Yes, how you express it counts. If I cannot understand what you are saying then you may not get full credit. Also, if you are excessively long in your answers it may impact your ability to finish the exam.
• What to bring. I'll start with the obvious: pencil (you may also want a backup). Since it's open-book, open-notes you could bring printouts of all the readings but that's a lot of trees. Chances are that if you don't do the readings and just try and do them during the exam to answer the reading-related questions it will take you too long and you won't finisht the exam.
• Advice on time. It's an open-book, open-note test so, conceivably, if you didn't study you could figure everything out during the test. If you use this approach, you will run out of time and not complete the test. There is simply not enough time to "learn" stuff during the test. So, studying really does pay off. At least, that's been my experience.
• Answering short essay questions. The temptation is to write down everything you've ever learned and hope at least some of it is relevant to the question. Implicit in this is that the grader (me) will just pick out the relevant morsels and disregard the drivel. However, it's not hard to recognize drivel; if you are using this type of shotgun approach (blast out a huge answer and at least one of the pellets will be on target) you won't get as much credit as you would have if you had just concentrated on the relevant stuff.
• Other advice. Please, write something down for each answer. I really do want to give you partial credit for what you know. I will also carry your error forward: if you make an early error in a calculation, you only lose credit for that error; subsequent stuff you do with that original wrong answer can receive full credit. Thus, it is possible to get an answer horribly wrong and still get most of the credit. If you notice your answer is horribly wrong but cannot fix it, stating so may help you a bit because at least you demonstrate a feel for typical answers. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, please answer the question that is asked. Don't make this exam about your ability to follow directions; make it about your mastery of the material and your critical thinking ability.
• Discussion board. I recommend checking the discussion board one last time the day before the final to see if there are any good bits of information on there.

2008 Final Exam. This gives a good idea of the types of questions I will ask and the types of answers expected. Note that I don't give you the answers - you can find them in the class material.