• Applications to be a CA for CS/ECE 374 A in Spring 2026 are available as a Google Form. Details are available on the first page. Please apply if you're interested and share the link with other students who you think would be a good fit!
• Practice exams for the final exam are available. Complete handwritten solutions and walkthrough videos for each practice exam will be posted on the days listed below.
  • Practice 1 (answer booklet) — solutions released late Sunday
  • Practice 2 (answer booklet) — solutions released late Tuesday
  • Practice 3 (answer booklet) — available soon — solutions released late Wednesday
  Just like the practice midterms, we strongly recommend attempting each of these practice exams yourself under exam conditions before looking at solutions or attending the corresponding review session.
• We will hold several review/practice sessions for the final exam, in place of other scheduled class meetings:
  • Sunday's “homework party” will be a review of the first practice final.
  • Tuesday's “lecture” will be a review of the second practice final.
  • Wednesday's “labs” will be a review of the third practice final.
  We cannot cover an entire practice exam in any of thwse review sessions; the problems we will actually cover will depend on requests from the students in attendance.
• There will be no homework party on Thursday evening, but all other office hours will continue as usual through Thursday, December 11.
• Due to a technical glitch (which Tech Services is still diagnosing), Thursday's lecture was not recorded. Emily plans to record and release a makeup video tomorrow; meanwhile, video of Jeff's lecture from Fall 2023 is available.

• Midterm 2 grades have been released on Gradescope.
  • Regrade requests can be submitted until Tuesday, December 23.
  • Here is the distribution of combined midterm grades and estimated course averages:

    

    The orange curve shows computed course averages (35% Homeworks 1–9 and GPS 1–9 + 65% Midterms 1 and 2) for all students who took both regular midterms and submitted at least half of the homework, in sorted order. These averages were used to define the vertical letter-grade boundaries. The blue dots show the corresponding midterm scores for each student. Blue dots show only combined midterm scores. Dots that are further above the orange curve indicate students with lower homework averages.

    Assuming a HW+GPS average of 85% (the class median), a combined midterm score of at least 85 is consistent with an A, a combined midterm score between 62 and 84 is consistent with a B, and a combined midterm score between 40 and 61 is consistent with a C. The following scatterplot shows scores for Midterm 1 (x-axis) and Midterm 2 (y-axis), with color bands that reflect these rough letter-grade boundaries.

    

    Please keep in mind that this is a very rough prediction of your final course grades, based on roughly 65% of the overall work. In particular, these estimates were computed without dropping lowest homework scores, including missing grades for unreported group members (see below), so they are slightly lower than the final grading algorithm would predict. Past experience suggests that most students‘ final course grades will be within half a letter grade of these estimates, but differences of a full letter grade (in either direction) are still common.

• Homework scores are still showing a significantly larger variance than usual. Please double-check your homework scores on Gradescope and report any administrative issues by filling out this Google form. We have already noticed several submissions where Gradescope was not informed about all team members, which means not everyone got credit for that homework. We are working to fix those issues as we find them, but with well over 2500 homework submissions so far, we are unlikly to find all such mistakes without your help.

• We are offering offer a conflict final exam, tentatively on Monday, December 15. If you cannot attend the regular final exam for any of the reasons outlined in the student code, please fill out the conflict registration form as soon as possible. The precise date and time of the conflict exam will depend on the exam schedules of students who fill out the form by Friday, December 5 at 5pm; however, the form will remain open to accommodate last-minute emergencies.
• If you have DRES exam accommodations, you are welcome to take the final exam at the DRES Testing Accommodation Center either Friday, December 12 or Monday, December 15, at any time of day. We strongly recommend scheduling your final exam at TAC as soon as possible, and certainly no later than Friday, November 21. Please contact Jeff or Emily if you cannot schedule an exam at TAC on either of those dates.

More information about the final exam will be provided after the fall break.