[MUSIC] Welcome to the Capstone class for the fundamentals of computing specialization offered by Rice University and Coursera. To get here you should have completed interactive programming and Python, principles of computing and algorithmic thinking. In this video, I want to do a few things. I want to talk a little bit about the philosophy of this class, and in particular, why we chose to make an exam the central part of this final class. I also want to talk about the logistics of the class and the exam. One important things I'm going to talk about the honor code. Make sure that you understand how the honor code works in this class. And then I'll wrap up with a few final thoughts to kind of get you through the exam. Okay, let's get to it. Well, most of you that have actually been working on this specialization started off on this page where you signed up for the fundamentals of computer specialization. If you read over Coursera descriptions of how specializations work. Each specialization is required to have a capstone class that completes the specialization. Now, most of the specializations on Coursera end with a capstone project. Now, when we propose to create a specialization on the fundamentals of computing to Coursera. Coursera said you have to have a capstone class. And we thought, really does it make sense to have another class that involves another project. You think about it. Over the course of the specialization of three classes you've completed, you've done more than 20 projects. So when thinking about how to put together a cap stone experience that would enhance the value of the specialization, we came to the conclusion that probably the best way to increase the value of the certificate that you're going to earn from the specialization is to have an exam. Now, I know nobody likes exams, and I don't expect you to love what you're going to be doing in the next couple of weeks, but what I'd like to do is explain a little bit of the logic behind why we decided to make this class focused around exams. All right, let's talk a little bit about why we chose to use an exam in this course as the primary assessment. So, I'm back here on a IIPP class site we are looking at the preamble of the Pong site. If you notice here I have a reminder about the Honor Code. So you may or may not have actually paid much attention to this, whenever you are working on IIPP. But, it says,they're solutions out on the web If you think one of your classmates has copied it, here's an email address you can send a complaint to. The reality is that tens of thousands and students have completed IPP. We've had a number of sessions we've offered on it. And if students want to copy solutions off the web then submit them in IPP, it's difficult to combat. We've built code sculptor, built the class so people can work together and work in a community. And so we don't want to undermine that. We don't want to build an environment where the honor code becomes the primary focus and learning becomes secondary. Principles of computing, algorithm are the same thing. We want you to focus on learning and not being worried about the honor code. But as the specialization is offered more and more, it's going to become more of an issue. Where solutions to all the assignments on these classes will be easily available on the web. So, if everybody can basically copy things or pry things out of the discussion forums by just asking exhaustively for help, at some point, you have to ask, what's the value of this? How can we demonstrate that we really know the material? The way you can do that is, we're going to have an exam. An exam is going to be an opportunity for you to demonstrate your mastery of the material. Now, what about exam questions getting out on the web, we're going to create original exam questions from each instance of the example offered. It's going to be very difficult to kind of pass the exam by just scouring the web for what's out there. So, our hope is that by having an exam we'll give you an opportunity to demonstrate that you really know the material. Now, I notice that it's still possible for you could've asked a friend to come in and help you on exam. We can't combat that. We could say hey, you need to go to a testing center and you could be testing the testing center. We could verify your identity but. That costs money. That's actually more than the cost of this class. And it requires you to travel, or some people don't have access to. So for us, this was the best way we could kind of find an experience we could deliver through Coursera that would allow you to demonstrate your individual mastery of the material and the specialization. So I hope, when you take this exam, you'll take it in the spirit that we're really trying to increase the value of this specialization to you. All right, let's start by taking a quick look at the materials available on the class site. The class really consists of one week of materials parsed into two lessons. The first lesson is just simply the exam logistics and an outline of the honor code for the class. And then, the second lesson is just the capstone exam. You're watching this video that gets the class overview. We'll talk a little bit about exam preparation. The short story is here you don't really need to prepare very much. We'll go over some frequently asked questions including the logistics of how the exam is going to work. We'll talk about the honor code, that's very important. And then when you've done that you'll just take the capstone exam. It's basically a 25 question cumulative exam bases on material from IPP, POC and outward thinking. Think of it as just kind of a long outward thinking homework. And then finally we have a short video that kind of wraps up the specialization, we really encourage you to take time and watch it. All right, we're here at the exam preparation page, there's a check list of things you should read over and look at as you prepare for the exam. I want to make two points basically beyond these. The first is that you really don't need to do much preparation for this exam. We're going to make sure that you have access to the most current sessions of IIPP, Principles of Computing, and algorithmic Thinking. We'll add you into those sites. Since the exam is going to be open book, open notes, open web and it's going to be a week long. My suggestion for prep is, just pop it open and look at it and start thinking about the problems. We're not going to provide any sample questions to get you started. Just look at the exam. That's the best way to start working on it. The second thing is, you're going to work with Python code during the class. We're going to provide it as .py files that are stored here on coursera.org. So we'd limit the number of issues with accessing the files. You're welcome to use what ever you favorite Python 2 as an environment. To work with the code you can use CodeSkulptor. You can use desktop Python. We're agnostic on that. However, for a couple of problems you will need to work with programs that involve SimpleGUI. Not a lot, but a couple. And so, for those you are going to need access to codeskuptor.org. If you don't you're have access, you're going to need to go to IPP, you can look at the fact there and it kind of have of a check list there to get it to working In an absolute pinch, if somehow you can't get access to codeskulptor.org, you either need to get a VPN, or you can try to use one of the desktop packages that students have built that emulate simple GUI on the desktop. But I'm going to warn you, those are unsupported, so if you have issues with them, we're not taking ownership of those. My advice is get codeskulptor working, you should have it working by now. Okay, here we are at the frequently asked question page. You should take a few minutes and go over all the questions in here and make sure you're familiar with the answers. I'm going to go over a couple of questions in more detail since they kind of discuss the structure of the capstone exam. So the first question's probably the most important one. The exam is a 25 question. Coursera style of quiz. It is going to have questions from high I P P, principles computing and algorithmic thinking. Just think of it as kind of a long homework from algorithmic thinking. One important difference from previous instances of this exam is that on Coursera's new platform, you are allowed unlimited tries on a quiz / exam, very nice. To discourage you just from blindly submitting it over and over, we've introduced a one week delay between taking various attempts at the exam. Another feature of the new platform is that you're not allowed to save your work as you're entering it or, more importantly, go back and review the feedback from your previous attempt of the exam has been graded. So that says that you really need to go through and print out a copy of your feedback, either as a hardcopy or as a PDF whenever you submit your exam for grading. I'll show you how to do that in just a second. Okay you should also pay close attention to the answer of the second question in the frequently asked questions. Basically are these exam questions the same on every attempt on the exam. Noticed here that attempt exam means that you have submitted the same exam for grading. That corresponds to 1 attend. You can look at the exam how many times has you. When you enter your answers and submitted for grading that's in an attempt, so every time you look at the exam before you submit your answers, you always get the same copy of the exam. However when you submit it for grading that corresponds to attempt. If you don't like your grade, the next time you attempt the exam, Coursera will randomize and choose different exam questions. Those exam questions may be very similar to previous, but may be changed in very small ways. Now there's A reason why we have done this. First is we don't want to encourage this kind of blindly shotgun taking the exam over and over and over and hoping to pass it. The second one is we want to discourage people from saying I'm going to look out on the web and see if I can find answers to these questions because we are using the same questions every time. The exam has different variance of the same questions that are chosen for subsequent attempts. So, after you've submitted the exam for grading, the next time you attempt it, read the questions very carefully. There may be very small changes to those questions. Don't let that trip you up. Work the question from scratch each time, and pay attention to detail. Now, I want to just kind of demonstrate real quickly about how this works on kind of a very small test exam I've built. So you can see what happens in practice before you try this on the real exam. Okay, I've made a small test quiz to illustrate how Coursera works. With quizzes and exams where you have multiple attempts at the exam. So here I am getting ready to enter my test quiz, it has one question, I'll go back to it. And the question just says okay, we need to select 1, so the correct thing to do here we'd click this button 1. Now what I can do here is I can go back and just pop out of here. And jump back into the test quiz again. And say Resume Quiz. And what you're going to see is, I'm going to see the same question again. It's going to ask me to select me to one. And notice I I still always have select one here, every time I go back and jump back in, I always get the same quiz, select one. So there's no randomization every time I look at the quiz. The only time initiazation is going to occur when I actually attempt it. So I'm going to go through and I'm going to say 2. I'm going to say Submit Quiz. And it says, unfortunately you messed up. So, notice I get some quiz feedback here. So the important thing to do here is to save that feedback, so I can look at it at a later date, unfortunately, Coursera doesn't easily let you go back and look at that feedback. So, here's what I'm going to do, I'm going to right click and say print, and I go over here, and I've got actually this now has been the print preview And you can't see it, but I've gotta go over here and select save as pdf and hit save and it's going to actually, save this as pdf. So, if you don't have the ability to print as pdf, you might consider installing that, and then saving this as a pdf file. And then you can go back and actually review what you've done on previous attempts every time you've doubt. So I'm going to cancel that and I'm going to go back now and I'm going to make another attempt at it. And I'm going to retake it and notice what happened. The question changed. Because I submitted it for grading. Now, the next time I take this, basically take this exam I get a new random version of the question. This one says select 0. And notice that every time I come in here and look at this, it's going to ask me to select 0. So the important thing is I can look at the exam as many times as I want. When I submit my answers and ask for grades, it's going to give me my grade. If I try it again, I'm going to get different variants of the questions. But all I see is the same grade until I resubmit for grading again. So two tricks. Make sure that you print out copies of feedback every time you submit. And pay close attention when you go and take a new version of the exam after you submit it for a grade. Okay, I want to talk briefly about one last question in the FAQ. It's the case when you're working through the exam and you're going to look at a question you think, I think this question is wrong. It happens, it happens fairly frequently. Students get confused and sometimes we do make mistakes. This exam has been taken before and vetted by lots of people, but we're not infallible. So you think something's wrong. Now, you're not allowed to post questions about the exam in the class discussion forum. So what do you do? We have an email address available for you to send questions to, it's fundamentalscomputing@online.rice.edu. You can send a question there. Now, I'll take a look at your question and see if there's some possible error in the exam. If there is, I'll fix the error and let you know. However, if it's just a case where you don't understand things correctly, I'm going to be very vague and kind of perfunctory about it. I'm not going to provide you with a lot of help on there. So you may get a response of the form, okay, the question looks fine to me and work on its own, but if you're really stuck and you say, man, there must be an error on this, feel free to send it into fundamentalscomputing@online.rice.edu, I'll take a look at it. All right, lets finish off by talking about the honor code for this class. Remember that the motivation for having an exam was to give you an opportunity to demonstrate that you could do your own work. So, the honor code for this class is designed to be compatible with that goal. So, here's what's allowed. You can solve anything that you can find on the session sites from IPP, Principles of Computing. Again, you should have access to those. You can use documentation from sites such as codeskulptor.org or python.org Yyu can use code in examples that you run in CodeSculptor or Anaconda or whatever your favorite IDE is. You're also welcome to look on the web to find information that might help you solve those problems. You can look at stack overflow. In reality, this is the way you're going to work In a real job as you're going to use resources that are available on the web to help you solve the problems that you need. Okay, what's not allowed? If this information is not out on the web, you shouldn't be using it. In particular, that means don't discuss exam questions with friends or colleagues or coworkers or folks that you solicit out of study groups. Don't be posting requests for help on one of the class session sites. Sorry, I don't stack overflow. In general, probably the most important thing is, and I'll just scroll down so you can see it is, avoid interacting in social media with folks who are trying to share answers. This is probably the biggest no no If we find out there's been a Facebook group put together where people are discussing the exam and sharing answers, this is going to be something we take very seriously and the folks that are involved may very well get expelled from the class and not get their specialization certificate, so my advice is just don't join any Facebook groups. Again, like I said, you can review for the exam very easily, just open it up and start looking at it and start looking at all the material you can find on the web. We've designed these honor code rules so they should be easy to follow. If it's on the web before the exam starts, it's fair game. If it's something that you solicit from other and put on the web, or you're getting by discussing from others, you shouldn't be doing it. Work through it on you're own. Okay, I'll just wrap up with a couple of thoughts. Let me just finish with a couple of words about the exam. You've made it through IPP, principles of computing and algorithmic thinking. You've done some really incredibly hard work. The exam is not designed to call out a certain fraction of few. We're rooting for an hoping that every single person that takes this exam passes it. It's designed to basically be a Sandy Check to make sure that you really did learn the material at a level that merits getting a certificate. So just relax, take your time, look at the exam questions. Don't panic if you don't understand everything immediately. Just work through it. You have two tries over two weeks. And so I think, and I hope, that all of you will really ultimately enjoy this experience and finish up and be proud of what you've done. Good luck.
