CSCI 265 Software Engineering Quizzes and Exams

Quizzes

There will be three quizzes, each worth 8% of the final grade.

Quizzes are written (paper/pencil) closed notes and closed book, no electronics permitted, and conducted in the student's registered lab section. Students will be permitted one double-sided 8.5"x11" 'cheat sheet' for each quiz. (The cheat sheet does not have to be handwritten.

Each quiz is intended to take roughly 50 minutes to complete, and will be held in lab on the dates below.

Quiz dates, tentative topics, and links to preparation material are provided below:

(links to prep material will be provided as we get closer to the quiz date)

Final exam replacing quizzes: the student's lowest quiz mark can be replaced by their final exam mark.

Individual work: as with all work in this course, quizzes and exams must be strictly individual efforts. The student is not permitted to seek or accept assistance from other individuals or sources (including AI-supported tools) in completing any portion of the quiz. Similarly, students are not permitted to provide assistance to other students in completing any portion of the quiz/exam. Note that VIU policies consider both parties to be committing academic misconduct in such situations, and both parties may incur the resuling penalties.

Final exam

The final exam will be worth 36% of your total grade and will be held as an in person written exam in the gym during the formal VIU exam period (Wed. Dec. 10 1-4pm).

The exam will be closed notes, closed book, no electronics permitted, but you are permitted one 8.5" by 11" 'cheat sheet' of notes. This can be of your own design, no restrictions on the content. (It does not have to be handwritten.)

The format will be ten questions, all equal weight, with a heavy emphasis on discussion and justify-your-answer styles of question.

A review session will be held in the final lecture prior to the final exam, and the material covered will consist of course all material up to and including the review session, including all lectures, quizzes, project components, etc.

While the exam can draw on any area of the course, some of the key focus areas for this year's exam will be software development life cycles, requirements/specifications and design, version control, code reviews and inspections, testing and automation, and the use of AI in software development.

You will be expected to be able to plan/discuss the use of git for version control, but detailed knowledge of specific command syntax is not expected. (Essentially know which commands are used for which purposes, and the circumstances under which they are/are not appropriate.)

Similarly, you will be expected to be able to plan/discuss the use of bash for automation, but detailed knowledge of specific bash syntax is not expected. (Essentially you should be able to work at a pseudo-code level of bash.)

Unlike past exams, there will be no focus on makefiles or C++ in this year's final.

This year's exam cover page and question headings

Here is a copy of this year's final exam cover page and question headings.

OLD EXAMS

Note that the material covered and order of topics varies from year to year (perl in particular was covered extensively in earlier years), so don't be alarmed if some of the questions cover material we haven't touched on.

Below are some older 265 final exams.
2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 , 2023, and 2024