About Quiz

Released at noon on Sat 11/10 and due by noon on Thu 11/15 is a take-home quiz that will cover Weeks 0 through 8 (and Problem Sets 0 through 8). The quiz is open-book: you may use any and all non-human resources during the quiz, but the only humans to whom you may turn for help or from whom you may receive help are the course’s heads.

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

The course’s heads in Cambridge will hold a course-wide prep session for the quiz on Fri 11/9, 9am–11:45am, in Sanders Theatre; it will be streamed live via the course’s website and will be available on demand immediately afterward via the same. The course’s staff will also hold office hours later that afternoon, per the schedule on the course’s website.

Among the quiz’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. The quiz’s format will resemble that of

with short-answer questions as well as longer-answer questions. (In prior years, the course had both a mid-semester test and end-of-semester quiz. This year has only an end-of-semester quiz.) Some questions may involve code (for which you’re welcome to use CS50 IDE). Expect to spend at least thirty minutes per question.

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. Attend or watch the review session.

  5. Review each lecture’s video, using its table of contents to focus on topics with which you’re less comfortable.

  6. Take past years' tests and quizzes and, only after you’ve attempted each of their questions, review their sample solutions. Realize, though, that some topics covered in past years 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.

  7. Review problem sets' specifications, sample solutions, and, if any, distribution code.