The first student draws a question and starts preparation at 9:00.
Your slot in the sequence of students to be examined is now available.
There is project in a few parts. This project is obligatory and is evaluated as a whole, resulting in either pass or fail. A pass is required to be qualified for the oral exam. More information on the project can be found on the project page.
The rest of this page is about the oral exam.
The first student draws a question and starts preparation at 8:00.
Your slot in the sequence of students to be examined is now available.
Important! Since the announcement of the sequence I have been informed that the first person is not coming. Thus, everyone will start half an hour earlier than originally planned. Later I have been informed that the fourth person on the list will not be able to make it, changing the expected time of examination further.
With regards to the creation of the sequence, there were requests for "early", "non-extremely early", "middle", and "late" with lots of requests for "early". Because of the relative sizes of the groups, I made the overall sequence "early", "non-extremely early", "middle", "whatever", "late", and drew lots internally in the groups, with a special treatment of the first two groups, where "non-extremely early" did not enter into the lottery for the very earliest slots, after which the remaining students in "early" and "non-extremely early" were merged for the remaining part of the lottery.
Even though the expected total examination time per student is 30 minutes (see below), it is not possible to calculate the exact examination time from the placement on the list, since students earlier on the list may not show up. Thus, students are expected to show up plenty early. In principle, all students who are taking the exam on a particular date are supposed to show up when the examination starts, i.e., at the time the first student is scheduled. This is partly because of the way external examiners are paid, which is by the number of students who show up for examination. For this particular exam, we do not expect many no-shows, so showing up an hour before the estimated time of the exam is safe (you never have to show up before the scheduled starting time of the first student, of course), i.e., if T is your calculated preparation starting time, show up before max(T - 1 hour, 8:00).
On the sequence list, you will see two rooms listed. These are very far apart when accessing them from the outside. Show up outside U30A.
After the preparation time, the actual exam takes place. This part also lasts approximately 25-30 minutes. You should start by presenting material related to the question you drew. Aim for a reasonable high pace and focus on the most interesting material related to the question. You may bring a short list of keywords for the actual exam to remember what you have decided to present. Thus, you are not supposed to use note material, textbooks, transparencies, computer, etc. for this part.
We, the examinator and the censor, will supplement with specific questions when appropriate, and after a while, we will end the discussion of the exam question that you drew and turn to material from other parts of the curriculum. Note that all of this as well as discussion between examinator and censor about the grade is included in the 30 minutes, so do not count on more than 15 minutes for your own presentation.
Some of the questions below are very broad, so you must select the material you choose to cover. You will of course also be evaluated based on your selection of material. If you only present the simplest material, you limit the grade you can obtain. On the other hand, a good presentation of the simple material is better than a very poor presentation of the harder material. For most questions, it is natural to first sketch the data structure and then present essential elements of the analysis. To obtain the best result, you should spend most of your time on the analysis.
When two data structures are mentioned in the question, you can still select your material freely. As an example, it is fine to talk only about universal hashing or only about perfect hashing (I would recommend the latter), and this will not in itself limit your grade. We might of course still ask you questions about material that you have decided to skip. Note that for the question "disjoint sets", you should be particularly brief when discussing the structure, since this is really material from an introductory algorithms and data structures course. So, here you should to an even larger extent focus on the amortized analysis.