Mike’s Courseware

Exams are hard enough. Don’t make avoidable mistakes that can cost you a letter grade or more. Many students miss key details of exam questions and exam strategy, costing them 10% or more off of their grades. This entry is meant to point out a few areas where students can go after some low-hanging fruit…improving their exam scores without studying much harder.

• Answer the whole question. Questions often have multiple parts, and these parts are not always listed out explicitly. For example, a question might read, “Why does IP fragment reassembly only supposed to occur at the destination host? Would it be desirable to reassemble IP fragments before they reach the destination host? Why or why not?” There are three sub-questions in that question and you should make sure you answer each one. You don’t know the weight the grader will place on each sub-question, so you could lose half of the credit or more by skipping one of them.
• Answer the question that was asked. Make sure you are addressing the question the instructor has asked you to answer. For a question that states, “How many IP addressed are contained in a subnet with a netmask of 255.255.255.128?” the answer is a simple number. You may want to show the logic you used to reach your conclusion (see below about showing your work) but keep it focused on the question at hand.
• Avoid extraneous detail. Answer the question directly without making unnecessary points. If the question is, “Explain the use of TCP sequence numbers” don’t start your answer with two paragraphs about the history of TCP and its use of ports. That level of detail is unlikely to be relevant. Instead, answer the key issue directly – focus on TCP sequence numbers. Another way of saying this is, if someone asks you the time, don’t tell them how to build a watch.
• Don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. At least two or three times a semester I have a student write a perfect answer to a question and am ready to give them full credit. But instead of stopping while they are ahead, they continue on and on, to the point where their answer eventually contains enough incorrect information that I am convinced they do not have a clear understanding of the topic. Deduction of points ensues.
• Show your work. There are two very good reasons to go through the effort to show your work: The first is that the instructor might require it, and will dock you a good chunk of credit, even if your answers are correct, when you don’t trace out the path to your conclusion. The second is that it allows the grader to give you partial credit if your path is at least somewhat correct.
• Don’t leave anything blank. This guideline may sometimes contradict always “answering the question that was asked,” but you can’t win if you don’t play, so make sure you’re in the game. Blank answers are easy to grade. You get a zero. No amount of complaining or negotiating will change that. If you answer a question, even with a guess, you might get lucky and score a few points of partial credit by at least being on the right track.
• Write clearly. If your writing is sloppy, the grader may have difficultly determining exactly what you’ve written. In most cases you will not get credit for an answer that is illegible or even partially legible.

I’ve linked into the course’s homework assignments and syllabus - look down and to the left. These items have also changed over the years, but I believe represent some fairly diverse problem sets, from the somewhat-rote to more speculative “thinking” exercises.

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