About Test

Released at noon on Fri 10/14 and due by noon on Mon 10/17 is a take-home test that will cover Weeks 0 through 5 (and Problem Sets 0 through 5). The test is open-book: you may use any and all non-human resources during the test, but the only humans to whom you may turn for help or from whom you may receive help are the course’s heads.

The test will be released via the course’s website and will be submitted via submit50. You should expect to spend several (but not 72!) hours on the test.

The teaching fellows will hold a course-wide review session for the test on Wed 10/12 from 1:00pm until 2:30pm in Sanders Theatre; it will be streamed live at live.cs50.net and be available on demand immediately afterward at cs50.harvard.edu. Sections on Mon 10/10, Tue 10/11, and Wed 10/12 will also be opportunities for review. Office hours on Wed 10/12 and Thu 10/13 will be additional opportunities for Q&A.

Among the test’s aims is to assess your newfound comfort with the course’s material and your ability to apply the course’s lessons to familiar and unfamiliar problems. Unlike past years' quizzes, the test will not have multiple-choice or true-false questions. But it will have short-answer questions as well as longer-answer questions. Some questions may involve code (for which you’re welcome to use CS50 IDE).

How to Prepare

Ultimately, how best to prepare depends on how you learn best. But allow us to recommend that you prioritize your studies per the ordering below.

  1. Review each lecture’s notes.

  2. Review each lecture’s source code, if any.

  3. Review each lecture’s slides.

  4. Review each lecture’s video.

  5. Take past quizzes. Realize, though, that some topics covered in past terms might not have been covered in this term. Rely on this year’s lectures and problem sets as the official sources for this year’s topics.

  6. Review problem sets' specifications, postmortems, and distribution code, if any.

Practice Exercises

The following two questions are representative of the type of question you may see on this year’s Test, given the new format:

You may also find this list of questions from years past more representative of the sort of questions we may ask this time around. Note, though, that the course’s content does vary slightly year to year:

  • 2015 Quiz 0

    • 8, 17, 18, 23

  • 2014 Quiz 1

    • 4

  • 2014 Quiz 0

    • 27

  • 2013 Quiz 1

    • 0, 1, 2, 12, 17, 20, 22

  • 2013 Quiz 0

    • 8, 21, 22