COA2 – Exam Wrappers

Exam Wrappers are a tool to help you reflect on and learn from your exam experience1 and earn back some lost points.

To submit yours, see the deadline on the schedule or submission site. Your should prepare a plain-text file (i.e., the kind you create with vi, nano, etc) named examnumberwrapper.txt containing containing the following sections:

  1. Preparation

    Reflect on how you prepared for the exam and how effective that was. Don’t limit yourself to the days immediately before the exam; how effective were you approaches to learning the material as the semester progressed as well?

  2. Errors

    List each mistake you made on the exam, and explain the correct answer. If possible, also explain why you answered incorrectly: what confused you?

    If there are questions you got right, but based on the wrong reasoning, explain those too.

  3. Plans

    Wrap-up this exam experience by planning what you’ll do differently in the future.

Optionally, you may add a fourth section

  1. Feedback

    What did you think of the exam itself? Are there topics you prepared for that we didn’t ask about? Are there questions you felt were unfair or ambiguous? Is there something we could have done to have made this a better exam?

We’d appreciate you separate your sections with headers underlined in equals signs and adding blank lines between paragraphs.

An example template might be:

Preparation
===========

I prepared for this exam by reviewing my notes with a friend, working through the practice exams, and writing ten new problems of my own based on the kind of problems I found tricky. As I did this ...

I thought this was good/bad because ...


Errors
======

I missed Q17 because I misunderstood the relationship between endianness and arrays. The correct answer is ... because ...


Plans
=====

To improve my learning going forward, I plan to ...

If you do not submit a wrapper, your initial exam score will stand as your exam performance. If you do submit a wrapper, that score can only go up, not down.

  1. See the teaching commons for a decent introduction to the idea of an exam wrapper.↩︎