{"content":[{"text":"FAQ \n Q: How long will the exam be, relative to the midterms?","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.085624,"width":0.46512000000000003,"height":0.037878999999999996}},{"text":"A: You had 50 minutes for each of the midterms, and you have 3 hours for the ﬁnal exam. The \n ﬁnal exam will be longer than the midterms, but not three times as long. I expect you will have \n less time pressure on the ﬁnal than on the midterms.","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.140887,"width":0.764704,"height":0.054668999999999995}},{"text":"Q: What’s the level of difﬁculty of the exam questions, relative to homework?","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.213302,"width":0.6418889999999999,"height":0.01963899999999999}},{"text":"A: The exam questions will be closer to Mini HW than to HW. You have two weeks to do each \n homework assignment, and I expect that you’re spending lots of time thinking deeply about the \n problems. You have 3 hours to do the exam, and so the questions that I ask won’t be as in-depth as \n homework questions.","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.250325,"width":0.7647029999999999,"height":0.072907}},{"text":"Q: But what will the actual questions look like?","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.34098,"width":0.39379899999999995,"height":0.019639000000000018}},{"text":"A: Here are some types of questions that I might ask (this is not a comprehensive list):","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.378003,"width":0.67418,"height":0.01818900000000001}},{"text":"• Given a new problem, show that it’s NP-complete. \n • Given a pair of problems Y and X and an input to Y , show what input to X is produced by \n our reduction from Y to X.","bbox":{"left":0.146134,"top":0.412595,"width":0.736228,"height":0.067247}},{"text":"• Discuss the implications of polynomial-time reductions, NP-completeness, etc. \n Q: How should I go about studying?","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.492473,"width":0.665289,"height":0.053686999999999985}},{"text":"A: The most important recommendation I can give is to study actively. Don’t simply read your \n notes and then conclude that you’ve mastered the material. Instead, go back and redo previous \n mini homeworks. Re-derive the solutions to examples we did in class without looking at your \n notes. Take some of the NP-complete problems we’ve seen and give reductions that we haven’t \n done in class.","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.563545,"width":0.7647030000000001,"height":0.09114700000000009}},{"text":"Q: Will the exam be curved?","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.672439,"width":0.23853799999999997,"height":0.019638999999999962}},{"text":"A: I aim to write my exams so that the median falls somewhere around a B+ (i.e., in the high 80s), \n and I do not intend to curve the scores. However, I reserve the right to change my mind should I \n discover after the fact that I’ve substantially miscalibrated the difﬁculty of the exam.","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.709461,"width":0.7647029999999999,"height":0.05466899999999997}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}