Exam Policies
There will be three exams, each taken online via gradescope Links to an external site.. Exams will test concepts from lectures and homeworks, and also require some computations to derive and analyze machine learning algorithms. We will average the scores of the three exams equally to determine an overall exam score.
Exam Format
Exams will be implemented as online assignments in gradescope. Questions will be a mixture of multiple choice, short answers (possibly requiring numeric calculations), and free response (where your work will be checked by a TA).
For numeric short answer questions, gradescope will automatically check the correctness of your answers. You may either enter fractions like 1/3, or numbers like 0.333 accurate to three decimal places. Simplify all answers to a single number, more complicated mathematical expressions may not be given credit.
Exam Timing
Exams will be released at 12:30pm PT on their scheduled date, and available until 9:30pm PT (for 9 hours) on the same day. Once you start an exam, you will have 60 minutes to answer questions; after that you can no longer change your answers. Thus before starting an exam, you should be sure you are in a quiet place with reliable internet access. Also note that 9:30pm is the last time you are allowed to submit answers, not the deadline to start the exam. Thus to be sure you have the full 60 minutes of time to work, you should start the exam no later than 8:30pm PT.
There will be an optional, ungraded "Exam 0" on Monday, February 1. The questions on Exam 0 will not be examples of material on future exams (they will be about the probability and discrete math prerequisites for CS178). Instead, Exam 0 is intended to give you experience with the timed and online format of gradescope exams. You will only have 60 minutes (sometime between 12:30-9:30pm PT) to answer Exam 0 questions, and Exam 0 will only be available during this 9-hour period.
Disability Accommodations
Some students have accommodations granted by the UCI Disability Services Center. If you are granted extra time on exams, gradescope will automatically extend the number of minutes you have to work. For example, if you are authorized to have 1.5x extended time, then you will have 90 minutes to answer questions. The deadline to submit answers will also be extended by 90-60=30 minutes, until 10:00pm PT.
Collaboration and Academic Honesty Policy
While working on the exam, you are free to refer to CS178 course materials including lectures, discussions, homework solutions, and textbooks. You may also use electronic devices to help with calculations, and any notes you prepared. However, you may not use internet searches or non-CS178 websites to find information about exam questions.
Unlike homework assignments, your work on the exams must be completely independent. While taking the exam, you may not discuss the questions with any other person (whether or not they are a CS178 student). Before the exam deadline of 9:30pm PT, you may also not reveal or distribute information about the exam in any way.
Academic dishonesty is unacceptable and has serious consequences at the University of California, Irvine. It is each student's responsibility to know and follow these guidelines, as well as the UCI ICS School Policy on Academic Honesty.
Exam Grading
Exam grades will be distributed via gradescope, with a rubric indicating why points were deducted. If you would like to dispute the points you received for some assignment, do so by using the regrade request function on gradescope. We will only allow regrade requests for one week after the date that grades are returned.
For online gradescope exams, numeric short answers are graded automatically. This grading is robust to small numerical errors, but not to mistakes like accidentally typing an extra character. If you think a correct answer was misgraded due to this issue, submit a regrade request, and the course staff can manually check it.
We will only consider regrade requests submitted via gradescope, and the course staff will not discuss exam grading during office hours or on Piazza. If you have significant concerns about your overall course standing, please arrange an individual meeting with the instructor.