CPS420

W2025 Final Exam

Toronto Metropolitan University University

Worth: 30%

Date, Time and Location

The midterm will be held on campus on April 23 from 7:00PM to 10:00PM in the MAC Arena. This final exam has been scheduled centrally by the university in accordance with the Senate policy on final exams and cannot be rescheduled by the instructors.

Seating Assignments: The university will be preparing seating arrangements, with each student assigned to a specific seat. These seat assignments will be posted in D2L Content > Seating plan for the final exam two weeks before the exam. Seat assignments will also be posted in the hallway before each exam.

Universal Design: This exam follows the universal design principle of extra time for assessments: It is a two hour exam that has been scheduled into a 3 hour time slot, thus providing time and an half to all students, regardless of their official accommodation status. This means that even though it is a two hour test, any student can continue writing the exam during the third hour (9-10pm) without needing to complete any paperwork to do so. We will not keep track of how long each student takes to write this exam. If you want to continue working on your exam, you can just stay in the room as long as you want until 10pm.

Structure and Format

This final exam is in person and on paper. The format is very similar to the posted past in-person exams (see below), but the questions are different.

Aids

You can bring a formula sheet to the exam: one doubled-sided letter-sized page of paper with anything that you want on it: definitions, formulas, drawings, whatever you think will help you. You can print this page or write it by hand. It can be black and white or colour. You may not use any additional tools to read it. No other aids are allowed, in particular no calculators or devices such as phones.

Crowdmark

This final exam is structured to use Crowdmark exactly the same way the midterm was.

Material Covered in the Exam

This section will be updated after the last lecture in the course. The material covered is all the material covered in the lectures starting with regular expressions and until the end of the semester. This material is in the D2L content modules 3 and 4. It includes but is not limited to:
  • Textbook Chapters 1.2, 12.1, 12.2, 9.1 to 9.9 (some 9.9 material may be exempted at the end of the semester)
  • Lecture Slides: 3.1, 3.2 except for 3.2B slide 31, 3.3, 3.4 up to page 18 (you may be asked to draw a DFA equivalent to an NFA and you can use the powerset construction algorithm in the remaining slides to do so, but if there is such a question on the exam it will be possible to draw the equivalent DFA without using the powerset construction algorithm)
  • Lecture Slides: 4.1, 4.2A except for the last three slides, 4.2B, 4.3, 4.4 up to and including slide 24, 4.5.
  • Material covered in labs 7 to 10
The final exam is worth 30%. This 30% will be distributed as 15% for regular expressions and automata, and 15% on counting and probability theory.

Studying for the exam

There are three resources you can use to study for the exams: old exams, labs and their solutions, and practice exercises.

  • Posted past in-person exams can be useful. Even though the exams were structured differently prior to 2020, exercises in past exams are valuable in that they provide good practice questions and also give a sense of the level of difficulty expected during exams in this course.

  • The labs in this course are slightly challenging and are meant to make you reflect more deeply on the material presented. As you can see from the posted old exams, exam questions will be slightly less challenging because they are time-limited, and are intended to evaluate a more fundamental understanding of the material. Nevertheless, it is recommended that you review the solutions to the last four labs because they are relevant for the midterm.

  • Textbook practice exercises are also useful.

Final Exam Office Hours

In addition to our regular office hours, we will be holding special office hours for last minute questions related to the final exam. Details will be announced at the end of the semester, Zoom invitations for these sessions will be posted in the D2L calendar.

This page is maintained by Sophie Quigley (cps420@cs.torontomu.ca)
Last modified Monday, 24-Mar-2025 17:33:13 EDT