B211 Internet Computing - Exam Information

Exam Information

Time and Venue

Check the official University timetable here.

Duration

You have 3 hours to complete the exam, not including 15 minutes reading time at the beginning.

Pass Years' Exams

The exam in 1999 and 2000 are not relevant. The exam format have changed quite considerably. The unit did not exist prior to 1999.

Sample Exam

Here is a sample exam (in PDF or MS WORD formats) indicating what this year's exam will be like. The questions in the final exam will not be the same as the sample exam, but the style and technical difficulty will be similar.

Exam Format

The exam questions total 100 marks.

Section I: News (5 marks)

5 questions of 1 mark each. Answer ALL questions.

The questions will be in a form similar to the questions given in the Good News Week self-tests. The news articles comes from the IT section of Tuesday's the Australian newspaper, from the beginning of the semester to week 10, when I set the exam questions.

Section II: Short Answers (60 marks)

30 questions of 2 marks each. Answer ALL questions.

Section III: Long Answers (35 marks)

14 questions of 5 marks each. Answer 7 of the 14 questions.

You may select ANY 7 questions, but list the 7 questions on the page at the beginning of Section III (see sample exam). If you do not list them, the first 7 questions answered will be assessed.

Students should answer the questions in the space provided below the questions.

Hint: The exam is actually quite short for a 3-hour exam. I believe many students will finish ahead of time. If you are slow and see many students leaving the exam hall early, do not let yourself be pressured into rushing. Use up all your time if you have to. There are no bonus marks for finishing early.

Number of questions from each lecture topic

As a guide on which lecture topic you should concentrate on, here are how the questions are distributed according to the topics:

Section I:

Not applicable.

Section II:

Topic 1: 9 questions
Topic 2: 8 questions
Topic 3: 2 questions
Topic 4: 7 questions
Topic 5: 1 question
Topic 6: 1 question
Topic 7: 2 questions

Section III:

Topic 1: 3 questions
Topic 2: 3 questions
Topic 3: 2 questions
Topic 4: 3 questions
Topic 5: 1 question
Topic 6: 1 question
Topic 7: 1 question

Questions from lab exercises

The lab exercises which are examinable belong to the lecture topics as well:

Lab week 2: not examinable.
Lab week 3: not examinable.
Lab week 4: topic 2
Lab week 5: not examinable.
Lab week 6: topic 2
Lab week 7: not examinable.
Lab week 8: not examinable.
Lab week 9: topic 3
Lab week 10: not examinable.
Lab week 11: topic 4
Lab week 12: topic 6
Lab week 13: topic 7

Frequenly Asked Questions

Q: Will we be asked to write or explain programming code in the exam?
A: No. But you will be asked about the concepts of the languages, such as the material in Topic 4. But you will not have to know language syntax as in assignment 2.

Q: Do we have to memorize acronyms?
A: You have to know the following important ones: TCP, IP, DNS, HTML, XHTML, CGI, HTTP, URL, and XML. Beyond that, all acronyms used in the exam will be expanded.

Q: How important is studying the lecture notes?
A: Critical! In the case where you know and understand all material in the lecture notes (and you read and understand the exam questions carefully), you will probably get a high grade for the exam.

Q: How much is the exam worth?
A: 40% of your final agregate mark for the unit, but you MUST pass the exam to pass the unit. See the grade calculation section in the assessment description.

Q: For answering Section I, do I need to be up-to-date with the news articles right up to the exam date?
A: No. I set the exam questions in week 10, so there will not be articles from after week 10 (19th October 2001).

Q: Will the questions in the exams be like the questions in Assignment 1 Part I?
A: No. The questions in Assignment 1 are research questions. They are meant to force you to find out a lot more than what is in your unit material. The exam questions in Section II and III, on the other hand, will be direct and come straight from unit materials (mostly lecture notes). You should see the difference when comparing the type of questions in Assignment 1 Part I and the ones in sample exam.

Q: How many questions from the sample exam will come out in the final exam?
A: Very few. Only 3 out of the 30 in Section II, and 1 out of the 14 in Section III of the sample exam will appear in the final exam. But although most of the questions will not be exactly the same, there could possibly be very similar questions, .

Q: How can I pass the exam without studying?
A: You can't.

Exam Consultations and Further Queries

I would be more than happy to meet any student or groups who are keen enough to do some revision or need some extra tutoring on the unit materials before the exam. Make sure you first go through your basic study as guided by information above. Then contact me by email to arrange times to meet.

If you have further questions, the best way is to post to the "Exam Queries" group in the discussion forum. If you don't feel comfortable posting, you can ask me by direct email. But be aware that I will copy the email with my reply to the discussion for the benefit of all students. I will remove the name of the sender, of course. If you do not wish me to copy your questions to forum, please indicate so in your email.

H.L. Hiew
Unit Coordinator