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Please read the following carefully. Please note that details here may be updated, and you should re-read this information as you get closer to the exam time.

If you are sitting a deferred or supplementary exam in February 2022, the exam is scheduled for 12:00pm on Thursday 24/2/2022. As always, it is essential that you confirm this information with the official university time table, which is always the definitive reference for any such matter.

The February 2022 deferred and supplementary exam will follow the same style and format as the final exam in November 2021. Therefore the information below, which was written for November 2021 should be used as your guide. One or two days before the exam, details on how to access the exam, etc will be published on the S2 2021 Piazza page.

The final exam will be distributed via GitLab, using the CECS exam GitLab server. The exam will be similar in style to the exam from Semester 2, 2020, which is available as a practice exam. The exam from Semester 1, 2020 is also available. A sample exam from 2019 is also available. The style of the 2019 sample exam is a little different since it was not designed for open-book, but nonetheless it contains numerous questions which will help you revise.

The exam will run for 195 minutes.

Self Invigilation

Academic integrity is paramount.

Maintaining integrity in an online exam is a challenging problem. Because students care about integrity, for our online exams we provide you with the opportunity to self-invigilate. If you wish to do this, you should create a screen recording of your entire exam (details below), including a webcam image of you and an ID card. Note that this process is encouraged, but not required. You will not be required to pass your recording on to ANU. You should keep your recording safely for one month. If ANU should raise any concerns about the integrity of the work you did during the exam, your recording will provide you with the opportunity to submit your screen recording as evidence to support your case.

Preparing For The Exam

Being prepared is important to doing your best in the exam. The steps below are designed to help minimize the possibility of running into avoidable technical problems during the exam.

What You Need To Do In The Weeks Before the Exam

Before the exam, you need to make sure all of your software is working correctly, and in order to do self-invigilation, that you know how to do screen recordings, can capture a live view on your webcam while doing a screen recording, and can do the practice exam and use the CI correctly.

  1. Ensure you have a working home setup for the course including IntelliJ, Java, JavaFX, and Git.
  2. Ensure you can access your ANU GitLab account.
  3. In order to self-invigilate, find screen recording software that you trust works well on your computer. Test it, and make sure you can successfully record the whole of your screen. Some options:
    • Quicktime is built into MacOS and allows you to easily do a screen recording. Instructions from Apple here. Note that for Mojave and later, you can bring up the screen recording with the hotkey Shift+Command+5, described here.
    • Free Cam is an application for Windows that provides very similar features to Quicktime. There are instructions on how to use Free Cam here.
    • VLC is a widely used open source application for Windows, MacOs, and Linux. VLC supports screen recordings as described here.
    • OBS is an industrial-strength recording platform for Linux, Windows and MacOS. It does far more than screen recording (I use it to stream our lectures), and is somewhat more complex than the above options. It is free and has good online support. Instructions on how to do a screen recording with OBS are here.
    • Nvidia’s ShadowPlay is a simple way to record your whole desktop if you are using Windows and have a supported Nvidia graphics card. Here’s a youtube video explaining how to do it.
    • AMD offers similar software if you are using a supported AMD graphics card. Details from AMD here.
  4. To self-invigilate, ensure that you have a working webcam and bring up a live view of your face, and your ID card, while recording. Ensure that this works, so that your screen recording can include a live view of you and your ID (if you don’t have an ANU ID you should use your driver’s license or passport).
  5. Familiarize yourself with the practice exam, and do as many questions as you can.
  6. Ensure that you can run the unit tests in the practice exam.
  7. Ensure that the CI is working correctly in the practice exam.
  8. Try doing some questions with your screen recording going to ensure that it captures your work. Include a brief live view with your webcam and ID at the start of the recording. Be sure to stop your screen recording at the end and check the saved file has captured things correctly. Ensure that your recording contains your whole screen and your webcam live view at the start.

What You Need To Do The Day Before The Exam

We will run an important technical check on the day before the exam. The check is optional, but very strongly encouraged. It should only take you a few minutes, but it is very important, as it will greatly reduce the chances of you having a technical problem during the final exam.

  1. In order to test self-invigilation, start your screen recording. To ensure you’re able to identify yourself, use your webcam to show your face and your ANU ID or your license or passport.
  2. Log on to Piazza and check for announcements there.
  3. Log on to Zoom (link will be provided on Piazza). Listen for announcements there.
  4. Clone your copy of the final exam into IntelliJ. You will gain access to a private GitLab repository in the Exam GitLab server. No student has access to their exam gitlab server outside of the designated times. The repo will have the exam instructions in it and a simple safety check question in it (HelloWorld). It will not have the exam questions in it. Do not change the name of this repo.
  5. Complete the simple HelloWorld safety check question, which should only take a minute or two. Check that the unit test runs correctly in IntelliJ. Complete the simple multiple-choice questions. Commit and push your work. Check the exam gitlab web page to ensure that your push was successful. Check the CI on the exam gitlab web page and ensure that it correctly graded your safety check questions (it may be slow, so you may have to wait). These two questions are not worth any marks, and are only there so that you can test that the technology is working correctly.
  6. In order to check that self-invigilation is working, stop your full screen recording and review the recording to determine whether it worked correctly.

If you have any problems completing the above, you will be able to ask for help from tutors, and we will help you fix any technical issues you may have. Please follow instructions in Piazza on how to ask for help. Because this is done well before the exam, it should be a relatively painless way to minimize the chances of any problem in the actual exam.

What You Need To Do During The Exam

  1. Make yourself comfortable and shut down all communication channels except the class Piazza forum and the exam zoom session (details will be made available before the exam).
  2. Start your full screen recording now.
  3. Open the exam in IntellJ (you should have cloned it earlier in the day, see above). Note: If you did not do the technical check, you will need to clone your exam now (your repo will be on the Exam GitLab server.
  4. Log on to Piazza and be sure to follow instructions there.
  5. Connect to the Zoom session (instructions will be on Piazza) and listen for the exam start announcement.
  6. As soon as the exam starts (but not before), do a pull on your exam repo. The pull will fetch all of the exam questions and the tests for them.
  7. Take time to carefully read the README.md file in the exam and the provided code for each question. There is no need to spend exactly 15 minutes reading, but we have allowed 15 minutes of reading time for you.
  8. Complete the exam. Commit your work regularly, and push whenever you’ve completed a question.
  9. It is your responsibility to keep track of time and push to GitLab before the end of the exam. However, we will provide you with aural announcements on Zoom, just as you might hear in a physical exam room.
  10. Five minutes before you finish the exam, check again that you’ve committed and pushed all of your work. Make certain that your tests are passing before you ever push work. If you push work that does not pass tests, the autograder will fail them — it is therefore essential that your code compiles and that the tests that once passed are still passing. As soon as the exam time completes, you will not be able to push. The last commit that you push to GitLab before the end of the exam will be used for marking. Any commits pushed after the end time of the exam will be blocked and will not count towards your exam mark. You may commit and push as many times as you wish during the exam time; only the final commit prior to the deadline will be marked.
  11. At the end of the exam, stop your screen recording, save it, check it, and keep it in a safe place for one month. Do not send it to ANU or add it to your repo.

Exam Do’s and Don’ts

  • Do not submit your video recording. This file is yours and stays private, unless you chose to present it as evidence.
  • Do not post to Piazza visible to all during the exam - ever.
  • Do ask questions directly posting to “Instructors” on Piazza
  • The exam is designed so that you do not need to consult any material, but if you feel the urge to look up something on your computer, this is fine.
  • Do not use any communication system (other than direct posts on Piazza to Instructors and the class exam zoom) during your exam - if you do, it will be counted immediately as collusion and will have serious academic honesty consequences.
  • Do not upload any exam material anywhere other than the exam server. If you do so, you will also become part of an academic collusion case which will stay on your permanent record at ANU.
  • Be very very careful searching for any material online. If you find references to material which might be the result of collusion (which hopefully will not exist), you are one click away from becoming part of a serious academic honesty case yourself. Remember that any of your activity must appear in your recording, and according to basic academic standards, we also expect you to reference in your pdf file anything which you might have included in your working. You will likely waste valuable time for your exam and expose yourself to serious risks, so we recommend you avoid doing so.

Finally: take your time and formulate neat and precise answers on your path to a great grade.

Oral Examinations

All assessment in this course may be subject to an oral examination. As part of the final exam, we may select a subset of students for followup oral examination, consisting of a small number of questions aiming to confirm their exam mark. If the convenor is not satisfied with the outcome of this oral examination, this may result in reduction of exam mark, failure of the final exam, and/or an investigation under ANU’s academic integrity rules.

Any student who is unable to complete the final exam on the designated date of the exam - for example, due to illness or technical difficulties accessing the exam - will sit an examination at a later date.

Updated:    16 Feb 2022 / Responsible Officer:    Director, School of Computing / Page Contact:    Steve Blackburn