Exam 1 Info

The Day of the Exam

A link to a PDF containing the exam questions will be sent to your @calpoly.edu e-mail address at 12 PM on Friday, July 10. Every student will get a different version of the exam, so make sure that you check your own e-mail. (Do not ask a friend to send you their exam because your answers will be graded according to the exam that I sent you.)
You will only be able to view this PDF in your browser. You will not be able to download or print this PDF. I recommend that you have several sheets of blank paper ready, so that you can work on the problems.
The exam will have 15 questions. The answer to every question is a number. You should enter your exam answers in this form.
The exam will start at 12:10 PM and end at 1:30 PM. Please make sure that your answers are submitted by 1:30 PM, or else you may not earn any credit for your answers.
You will have until 2:00 PM to scan, organize, and upload your work as PDF to Canvas. This will be used to award partial credit, so please try to be as organized as possible. You can save Colab notebooks as PDFs. If you are taking pictures with your phone, please enhance and align the images using a service like CamScanner before uploading.

The exam is open-book and open-Internet. I encourage you to use Python or R to calculate probabilities and Wolfram Alpha to evaluate mathematical expressions.
The only rules are:
- No communication with anyone during the exam, except for Professor Sun, who will be available on Discord. That includes: other students, the TA, tutors, family members, people on Reddit, etc.
- No posting exam questions on the Internet. Remember that every student will have a unique exam. If you post questions from your exam, I will know that you did it and be able to prove it. You are equally responsible if someone else posts questions from your exam. That is why it is important that you do not share the link to your exam with anyone else.
Violation of either rule will result in an automatic 0% on this exam and a report to the Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities (OSRR).
I am trusting all of you to do the right thing. If I catch cheating on this exam, the rules for Exam 2 will be stricter.

On Friday evening, you will receive an e-mail report with your preliminary score, which is just based on whether the answers you submitted were right or wrong.
You will then be invited to submit a “case for partial credit”. For each answer that you think deserves partial credit, write at most 1 page explaining what you did, why it was wrong, what the correct answer is, and why your answer is deserving of partial credit.
I encourage everyone to submit a “case for partial credit” (unless you got a 100% on the exam!). Writing this “case” is part of the learning process; it will give you practice writing a mathematical argument, and it will help you iron out your misconceptions. It is not grade-grubbing, but a deliberate part of the course experience.
The case for partial credit should be uploaded as a PDF to Canvas by Friday, July 17.

Exam 1 will only cover up to and including Lesson 21 (Sums of Random Variables), which will be released on Wednesday. Thursday’s material will not be on the exam.
The difficulty and style of the questions will be similar to the “Additional Exercises” that I post after each lesson. Over the coming week, I will be adding to the bank of questions. Solve as many of these questions as you can.