Week 6

Class:
This past Friday was our exam in the class and I'm really annoyed... Not with the exam, or the format, but with myself for not being as prepared for it as I would have liked. This class for whatever reason has made me super competitive and I was really counting on making a high score on this exam to solidify my rank/standing in the course. So basically I spent WAY more time prepping for the software engineering exam (same day) as I did for this exam and now I really regret it. As I mentioned, the exam wasn't too difficult, nor did it cover material that was completely unexpected. I just wish I would have studied class structures a little better before the exam. The exam format was definitely an upgrade from previous years where we were asked to choose the correct output (multiple choice) after reviewing some code similar to our quizzes. This time the entire exam was like a giant test suite that you could put in a C++ file and actually compile and run. The idea was to code up some solutions to the methods the professor asked us to write and then write test cases for those methods. One of reasons why I like this new format is because even if you don't know how to code a solution, you could create test cases for it and gain some quick points. Furthermore the exam actually prepared you for a real life career choice. If you walked away from this exam with the majority of your points on the exam coming from writing test cases, then this may indicate that you are better suited for a Software Development Engineer in Test role rather than a Software Development Engineer role. Anyways, I learned my lesson and will definitely need to hop on studying for the next test WAY ahead of schedule to get as close to that A grade as possible.

Project:
Not happy about our next project at all. For starters, we only have one week to complete the project as the professor released the project just a few days before the exam. Given that I am in both classes, I had two exams to study for which meant having to prioritize the exams over the projects. As a result I began working on the new project on Saturday. After spending several hours trying to wrap my head around the code I realized the task of implementing the standard library version of deque would not be as easy as BigInteger. There seems to be far less direction on this project. Furthermore, the test suite was of no help. It contains only two test cases and provided no hints as to how to implement the deque. Given the time constraint of one week I expected there to at least be a solid set of test cases given to us. Regardless the professor has informed us that he will be going over the project again in class on Monday. Lets just hope we get enough direction to get it completed by Thursday.