Exam resit revision help/tips (open book)

Scott Salisbury

Scott Salisbury

Scott Salisbury

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I’ve got a resit examination coming up from the first year of my degree, which I failed by 7% from the pass mark.

The problem is, and the reason I’m asking here, is that it is an open-book examination, where you’re allowed to take in any lecture notes, paperwork, books and whatnot. Sounds like a walk in the park, or not.

I’m not actually sure how to approach revision for this and doing what I did before is not likely to improve my mark. I’ve decided to get my finger out my arse and actually do this properly if I want to get anywhere.

The structure of these exams are different, it’s more long problem solving than just answering questions on what you remember about the subject, so revising from books and lecture notes makes little difference if you still don’t understand the problems in the first place.

The only thing I’ve used so far are the past exam papers, which I’ve already done and had friends check over, but I feel like I need to do something else other than aimlessly read through lecture handouts that I will already have in the exam with me anyway. This is what I done for my previous attempt as well.

I have no trouble understanding the programming language and making basic programs, but the questions in the exam can be very mis-leading and difficult to grasp.

Has anybody here ever done an open-book exam? Did you revise for it? What methods did you find helpful? Any tips to give?

If anyone is interested, my course is Computing Science and the exam is Object-Oriented Program Design and Development (Java).

Thanks in advance and sorry for long post,
Scott.
 
Ask me on msn if you need any help mate. Can tell you what I did for it - and got 72%.
 
What sort of questions do they actually ask (give a few examples). Then I could probably give you some good advice about how best to approach revision (I've done a Computer Science degree myself - but not open book exams).
 
Its pretty dam easy lagz.. First section is short answers, like what is the contents of the array after quicksort on 2nd iteration. Or what is the output from this sample bit of code (Stacks/Queues).

Section B is mutliple choice but negatively marked if you get them wrong. Stupid things like "Recursion is frequently used to implement a “divide and conquer” algorithm?" :)

Section C is the hardest one - Where you actaully have to write some code. You get to choose 2 out of 4 questions I think. Example was here is some algorithm, write the code to implement it. (The one I choose was about reverse polish notation stacks and some heap thing).

EDIT: Here's a past paper http://www.darkfibre2.net/csc162.pdf

Scott: I ended up doing hardly any revision for it, since it was 164 I was worried about. I did take in a java reference book and my coursework code, but really due to time presure I didnt get much of a chance to look at them. I think your best off doing the first two sections as well as you can. Then spending any time left on the 3rd.
 
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