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COMP9417: Final Exam Information

Conditions

● The exam will begin on Thursday 19 August 08:00 2021 AEST (Sydney time).

● You have until Friday 20 August 08:00 2021 AEST (Sydney time) to complete this exam, i.e., you have a period of 24 hours.

● Only submissions made before Friday 20 August 08:00 2021 AEST (Sydney time) will be marked, except for:

○ Students with extra exam time approved by Equitable Learning Services (ELS), who can make submissions after Friday 20 August 08:00 2021 within their approved extra time (please ensure you have had this confirmed by LiC (Mike) or Course Admin (Omar) before the exam).

● You are not permitted to communicate (email, phone, message, talk, …) with anyone during this exam about the exam content, except COMP9417 staff via the course Teams chat directly (See Forum Details below).

● You are not permitted to get help from anyone but COMP9417 course staff during this exam.

● This is an open book exam. Please read more about open book exams here: https://student.unsw.edu.au/open-book-and-take-home-exams

○ You are permitted to access papers or books or course materials or search relevant material online

○ You are not permitted to use code-synthesis tools such as GitHub Copilot.

○ You are not permitted to post questions online on forums such as Quora, StackExchange, etc. We are actively monitoring these sites.

○ There are serious consequences for violating any of these conditions.

● Even after you finish the exam, do not communicate your exam answers to anyone or discuss the exam for a period of at least 24 hours after the exam deadline. Some students have extended time to complete the exam.

● Do not place your exam work in any location, including file sharing services such as Dropbox or GitHub, accessible to any other person.

● Ensure during the exam no other person in your household can access your work.

● Your zPass should not be disclosed to any other person. If you have disclosed your zPass, you should change it immediately.

● Deliberate violation of exam conditions will be referred to Student Integrity as serious misconduct

Structure

● There are 4 questions on this exam, each with multiple sub-parts.

● Total marks available is 100.

● Questions are worth equal marks (25 marks each).

● The sub-parts of questions are not worth equal marks.

● The questions are a mix of programming (Python only) and theory questions.

○ Some of the questions have provided data files

○ For programming questions, we will provide you with a .py template.

● Answer each question in a SEPARATE .pdf and .py file (a .py file is needed only if the question requires programming). No .ipynb submissions will be accepted.

● We will create a separate Moodle object for each question, and you will submit q1.pdf and q1.py to the ‘Final Exam Question 1’ Moodle object, q2.pdf and q2.py to the ‘Final Exam Question 2’ Moodle object, and so on. You can submit multiple python files for each sub-question.

● Submissions are limited to a maximum size of 200MB per question. You should not have any issues meeting this constraint. If for some reason you do, you may need to compress your PDF file using a free app, such as this one: https://smallpdf.com/compress-pdf or this one: https://pdfcompressor.com/

● You may submit your answers as many times as you like. The last submission ONLY will be marked.

● Do not leave it to the deadline to submit your answers. Submit each question when you finish working on it.

● You can verify what submissions you have made on Moodle easily (the same way you can verify your submissions for Homework 1, for example). Please double check your submissions.

Technical Details

● Python packages required: Python standard library, numpy, matplotlib, sklearn ONLY are required for this exam. You can use Pandas if you prefer, but it is not needed.

● You will not be required to use JAX or scipy or pytorch for this exam. You do not need GPU/TPU, etc.

● Some questions will restrict usage of specific libraries, so ensure you read question instructions carefully. For example, some questions may state: usage of sklearn for this part is strictly prohibited. Using a prohibited package will result in a zero grade for that question.

● You are not permitted to use Sympy or Matlab. Any questions that ask you to ‘show working’ must be done by hand.

● Questions that require manual working out can be done via tablet, or by taking a photograph of your working on paper, and adding it to your PDF for submission.

● Where possible, we will provide code that takes care of technicalities so that you can focus on the actual machine learning part of the exam. For example, we will provide you with some plotting template code to produce requested plots. This does not mean you shouldn’t understand how to produce plots on your own.

● We have tried to make the questions on the exam as independent as possible. For example, if you are unable to complete Q2b, you should still be able to attempt Q2c and achieve full marks for it.

● No MCQ questions on the exam.

Forum

● We will not run a traditional forum. We will use the following framework:

○ An exam supervisor will be announced on Teams - General. For example, at the start of the exam, we will announce on General that “Omar Ghattas is the current exam supervisor”, and that will change periodically during the exam period.

○ If you have any questions about the exam, you must send a direct message to the exam supervisor. Do not post in any Moodle forum, and do not post on General.

○ The exam supervisor will read your question and respond with one of two possibilities:

■ If your question is valid/requires clarification, they will respond: “Your question will be clarified in the next update”.

■ If your question is deemed invalid (the supervisor feels that the spec does not need clarification and that you need to read the question more carefully), they will respond by saying: “Please read the question more carefully”

○ We will maintain a single document called ‘Exam-Clarifications’ and this will be available on Moodle. Any clarifications deemed necessary by the exam supervisor will be added to this document. The document will be updated periodically (this depends on the number of clarifications that are required. It will not be updated more frequently than once an hour). An announcement in General will be made whenever an update is made. Do not respond to messages on General.

○ The exam supervisor will change every 4 hours or so. These changes will be announced on General, and you will need to direct your questions to the new supervisor. For example, we will say “Michael Bain is the current exam supervisor”, and you will need to message Mike directly.

○ If you make any posts on General or on Moodle, they will be immediately deleted by the exam supervisor, and potential penalties will be applied to your final exam grade.

● Why are we running the forum this way?

○ This avoids having a cluttered forum.

○ This avoids students having to constantly monitor the forum.

○ All students will have access to the same information at the same time.

○ This makes it so that a student needs to only periodically check the General Teams channel during the exam for updates.

Marking

● Available marks for each question and sub-question will be detailed in the final exam spec.

● Some questions will require you to provide a screenshot of your code in the PDF, along with a copy of the code in the corresponding .py file (which is the same as in the homeworks).

● There is no hurdle requirement on this exam. You need a total course mark of at least 50 to pass COMP9417.

● Exam marks may be scaled up if this is needed to achieve an appropriate mark distribution. We have not generally needed to use scaling in the past. We will not answer any further questions about scaling.

Troubleshooting

If you have a problem that can't be fixed and you can't complete the exam, you should apply for special consideration.

This will require (convincing) evidence of the problem. Take screenshots documenting the problem, for example:

● error messages

● screen not loading

● timestamped speed tests

● power outage maps

● messages or information from your internet provider regarding the issues experienced

You must also still get in touch with the exam supervisor as soon as it is clear the issue can not be fixed.

Revision

1. Tutorials (theory) <- watch videos, youtube videos

2. Labs (code)

3. Homeworks + Solutions

4. Lecture Materials + Moodle Forums (good questions have been asked here)