CS 1713 Introduction to Computer Science, Spring 2008 Midterm Exam 2 Comments

17 people took this exam. Only 6 grades were above 70.

Comments on specific problems:

1. There are several ways of doing this problem, including creating a new string that is the reverse of the original and then comparing the two strings. In any case, your solution needs to have a loop that uses charAt to look at each character in the string.
2. I didn't expect people to have trouble with part a).
   For part b) you had to understand that a 2-dimensional array is an array of arrays.
3. Too many people could not write a correct linear search.
   Some people did a selection sort instead of an insertion sort.
   About half of the class got fewer than 5 points (out of 20) on the insertion sort.

• You should be spending between 8 and 12 hours outside of class each week on this course.
• You should be learning this material as we go along, and not waiting for the days before the exam to cram.
• If you are a CS major, this is the most important course you are taking this semester. It is the foundation for the next course (Data Structures).
• If you could not get at least 50% on this exam after you were told what more than half of the exam would be, you need to reconsider either the amount of time you are spending on this course or what your major should be.