Exams

#	Topic	Date
1	PyTorch, linear-algebra, regression basics	Mar 11
2	Deep nets and advanced ML models	May 01
3	Conflict exam(s) (during final period)	TBD

Couple things to note about exams:

There will only be two midterms in this course (no final).
The final exam time is reserved for conflict exams that students who missed one or both of the midterms need to take.
All the midterms will be administered during lecture time in the usual lecture room.
The final will be used as a time to make up any exams previously missed and will be scheduled according to the registrar’s schedule.

Exam Policies

Besides the obvious “don’t cheat” exam policies outlined in the policies page you should know about the following exam procedures:

Conflict exam

So I recognize that exceptional instances happen that prevent someone from taking an exam. If at any point in the semester, something happens where you need to miss an exam, a conflict exam will be offered at the end of the semester doing the final exam period. You don’t need prior approval or a “good” excuse. I have no interest being an arbiter of what is and isn’t a valid excuse. You miss an exam, you can take it in the final exam period. You miss two exams, you take them both during the final exam period. Some clarifying issues:

If you already took an exam, you can’t take the conflict. The one exception is for students that did horribly on one exam (scored in the bottom 20% of the course), and then did great on another exam (scored in the top 20% of the course). In that case, please contact us and the staff will consider allowing a conflict as a sort of redemption. This policy is for students that would’ve done great but just had a bad day.
While I will do my best to ensure the standard and conflict are equal difficulty, I’m not perfect (no professor is) and there’s always the possibility that the standard and conflict exams have differing difficulties. I will also curve the exams so that they have the same average but as someone that has been doing this a long time, the conflict exam will have fewer people, making establishing a curve less stable. For this reason I strongly recommend taking the exam with the rest of the course during the normal exam time.
This policy applies to DRES students as well.

Cheatsheet

I’ve wrestled with the concept of cheatsheets a lot in past semesters. Ideally, what a cheatsheet is for is to help you memorize tedious equations or details that are easy to forget. However, I like to give exam questions that are very similar to the HWs/labs. In prior semesters, I noticed that cheat sheets didn’t contain definitions/algorithms. Instead, they contained copied questions and solutions of HW/lab problems. Basically cheat sheets had become a “guess what Kani might put on the exam”-sheet. Worse, many, many people simply copied the cheatsheet solutions and were frustrated when they learned that those solutions didn’t apply to the exam problems. This leaves me with two options:

Make sure that the exam problems are changed up so that copying from a HW/lab problem would hurt more than help.
Eliminate cheatsheets altogether.

I think I’ve come up with a solution that’d help everyone. We will construct a communal cheat sheet for each of the exams. These cheat sheets will be posted on the website well in advance of the exam and will be attached to the back of the exam.

This lets me use problems that many of you have seen before but know that the people answering those problems are doing so because they actually mastered the material.

Use pen

The exams will be scanned and uploaded to Gradescope where they will be graded by the TAs. Unfortunately, in the past we have had a problem with a number of individuals that used a pencil with a light touch causing the exam to be illegible. Therefore, we’re banning pencils. I’m not going to go around confiscating pencils like some weird pen nazi, but if we see an exam that is difficult to read, we will take off points. Just use pen, if you need to change something you can always cross out the previous answer and make a note for the grader to look at the scratch page.

Regrades

Regrade requests will be open for a week once grades are released. Regrade requests are not intended for arguing about point allocation, or whether the grading scale is fair.

Unfortunately, certain students think that they can tire us into giving them point that they did not earn, by keep asking for unjustified regrade requests. As such, superfluous, argumentative and repetitive regrade requests, after an appropriate warning, would results in a zero on the relevant questions - please do not waste our time.

DRES

If you have a DRES accommodation, please email the course staff directly (not sure if sending documents over Piazza is compliant with EHR policies or not, but why risk it). Make sure I respond that I’ve recorded your accommodation! If I don’t respond, email again.
Because of the limited staff, DRES students will take the exams at the TAC synchronously with the rest of the class. DRES students that need additional time for exams are expected to schedule exam proctoring with the Testing and Accommodation Facility. I’ll try my best to send out reminder emails, but it is your responsibility to make sure you have registered for TAC accommodations.
Best thing you can do is to schedule the exams with TAC now. That way there is no chance on forgetting to schedule a slot and missing out on your accommodations.
Regardless of if you have extra time, you are expected to show up to the exam on time. TAC will refuse to accept any individual that arrives to an exam more than 30 minutes late. I had to implement this rule because in the past, I’ve had multiple DRES students have +50% time on the exam and show up to the exam late by that amount of time (effectively using the extra time as an opportunity to sleep in). Stuff like this makes it harder for DRES students that actually need accommodations to get, so please do your best to show up to the exam on time.