The following are standard instructions for CS 173 examlets. Please familiarize yourself with them ahead of the first exam. See this information about how to make up missed examlets, and also this information about disabilties accomodations.

Time and location

All of the bi-weekly examlets will be taken in-person through CBTF, where you can resreve a 1 hour 50 minute slot anywhere in that week's three-day window.

General rules

You have 1 hour 50 minutes to do the exam, starting from when you open it.

This is a closed-book exam: no books, no notes, no looking on the internet, no consulting other people (e.g. friends). Scratch paper is ok, but it must start off blank. 

The CBTF will provide you with a basic scientific calculator, but a calculator will rarely be useful and will never be required.

Foam earplugs are ok, but headphones and earbuds are not allowed.

For open-answer questions, your answer must be typed directly into the answer box. You cannot upload scans of handwritten work. Cut and paste from other editing windows may be possible but can result in messed-up formatting or cause the exam window to lock up.

Save your work frequently. PrairieLearn will autosubmit saved work if you run out the clock without pushing the submit button.

Doing the exam

Points may be deducted for solutions which are correct, but hard to understand, poorly explained, excessively hard to read, or excessively complicated. Use your best mathematical style.

Open-answer questions asking for a short factual answer normally also require brief justification or work. Provide this unless there are clear indications to the contrary, e.g. the question is worth only a couple points. You can lose significant points for a short answer with no justification. You can also lose points for leading up to the final conclusion but never actually stating it.

Unless explicitly requested by the problem, it is not necessary to simplify or calculate out complex constant expressions such as 0.7¹⁵ or 7! or log₃ 2. However, you should simplify expressions such as logarithms inside exponents (e.g. 3^{log₂ n}).

Use whitespace to make your math easy to read, e.g. use paragraphs and linebreaks, do not make any individual equation very long.