Overview
The exam for this course is a 120-minute on-campus computer exam (course code 328059-M-6), taken in TestVision. It is a closed-book exam with no internet access, though students may download selected cheat sheets from the exam’s introduction page.
Key points to keep in mind:
- four exam dates are offered each academic year, of which students may take part in at most two.
- only the official exam “cheatsheets” are permitted; no other resources or communication tools are allowed.
- communication with others about the exam is strictly forbidden.
- do not include your name or student number in submitted files unless explicitly asked, to ensure anonymous grading.
Date and Time
- Please view the date & time directly on Osiris.
Exam Format
The exam consists of a mix of open questions (requiring open-text answers or file uploads) and closed questions (such as multiple-choice, ranking, or matching). These questions are organized according to the learning goals of the course, and the content for each learning goal will be drawn from both the tutorials and the course book1.
The exam is worth a total of 120 points, corresponding to roughly one point per minute of work. This design should help you pace yourself and prioritize your effort during the exam.
In terms of cognitive skills, the exam does not stop at testing factual recall. Instead, it follows Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives, which means you will be assessed across different levels of thinking:
- Knowledge & Comprehension – recalling key concepts and demonstrating understanding of methods and ideas.
- Application – using techniques or code you have learned in tutorials and lectures to solve new problems.
- Analysis – breaking down complex tasks (e.g., a dataset or research workflow) into their component parts and reasoning about them.
- Synthesis – combining different elements (e.g., data, code, and interpretation) to produce a coherent result.
- Evaluation – critically judging the suitability of an approach or comparing alternative solutions.
Together, these levels ensure that the exam does not merely check whether you remember material, but also whether you can apply, integrate, and evaluate it in realistic scenarios.
Overview of Questions
The table below outlines the types of questions you can expect, along with their sources for each learning goal of the course.
| No. | Learning goal | Question type | Questions based on tutorials | Questions based on book |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Use R to clean and transform data for analysis | Synthesis | 20P (2Q) on engineering tutorial | 4P (1Q), ch. 7 |
| 2 | Use GitHub for managing empirical research projects | Eval. | 12P (4Q), ch. 2, 5 | |
| 3 | Use Git/GitHub for versioning files and collaboration | Appl. & Eval. | 24P on GitHub tutorial | 12P (4Q), ch. 6 |
| 4 | Use R for generating automatic reports | Compreh. & Appli. | 12P on Rmarkdown tutorial | 6P (2Q), ch. 4 |
| 5 | Use Workflow Management Tools | Appl. & Eval. | 24P on Make tutorial | 6P (2Q), ch. 3, 8 |
https://dprep-book.hannesdatta.com/↩︎