Exam 2 Information

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1) Introduction

This page contains information related to exam 2 logistics (including how to request conflict exams and accommodations), practice exam materials, as well as some additional exam study tips that you may find helpful as you prepare for the exam.

2) Logistics

  • Exam 2 will be held on Wednesday, 24 April from 7:30pm until 9:30pm (2 hours).

  • The exam covers material from weeks 1-9 (lectures, recitations, psets, and/or labs) but no damped second-order circuits.

  • The exam will be held in room 50-340 (Walker Gym) unless you have made alternative arrangements with us.

  • We will not hold a review session, but we will have our normal open lab hours and instructor office hours during the weeks leading up to the exam, so those are great opportunities to get questions answered.

  • The exam will be given on paper, so please make sure to bring one or more pencils with you.

  • The exam is closed-book, but you may use one 8.5\times11" sheet of handwritten (not printed) paper (front and back) as a reference during the exam. These notes must be written directly on the page, not printed from a digital copy.

  • You may not use electronics of any kind during the exam (including computers, calculators, phones, tablets, music players, etc.).

  • Proctors will be available to answer administrative questions and clarify specifications of problems, but they should not be relied on for help with solving the problems.

2.1) Conflicts and Accommodations

  • If you have a direct conflict with an MIT class or MIT extracurricular such that you are unable to attend the scheduled time, please e-mail 6.200-personal@mit.edu with the subject line "6.200 Exam 2 Conflict," and please explain the nature of your conflict in the e-mail.

  • Per institute policy, you are not allowed to miss regularly scheduled class periods in your other classes for the 6.200 exam; if you have a conflict, you must work with us to schedule a conflict exam consistent with (not conflicting with) those regular class periods.

  • If you require accommodations for the exam (with a note from DAS), please e-mail 6.200-personal@mit.edu with the subject line "6.200 Exam 2 Accommodations."

  • Please contact us by Thursday, 18 April if you have a conflict or require accommodations.

3) Practice Materials

Practice materials for the exam are now available below. Each packet is intended to be approximately representative of the length and coverage of a regular exam, but note that emphasis and coverage may have changed slightly from semester to semester (for example, RLC circuits are not covered on our exam this semester, but they were in some previous semesters).

In order to best make use of these practice exams, we strongly suggest working through them in as authentic an environment as possible (i.e., on paper, with a time limit of 2 hours and without access to external resources), and without looking at the solutions.

Nanoquizzes:

3.1) Answers to Practice Quizzes

Answers to the practice exams are available, but you are strongly encouraged not to look at them until after you have tried the exams yourself (ideally under normal exam conditions). Note that many of the questions have multiple correct answers and that the answers documents only show one such answer.

Many of the questions only include answers, without detailed explanations, so that you can try to work through the problems again if you arrived at a wrong answer. If you are unsure about why an answer is right (or if you think an answer might be wrong, or if you have an alternative answer that you are unsure of), feel free to ask about it in open lab hours, instructors office hours, or via the e-mail lists!

If you have any questions as you're working through these, please let us know!

4) Exam Study Tips

What do you plan to do (specifically) between now and exam time?

If you don't have a concrete study plan (and even if you do) this section has some suggestions that you may find useful as you prepare for the exam.

  1. Review the course materials and your own notes from lectures, recitations, psets, and labs. Ask yourself:

    • What are the main topics that have been covered in lectures and recitations? What are the main topics exercised in p-sets, nanoquizzes, and labs?
    • What are the topics you feel like you understand well?
    • What topics did you struggle with in the as they were being introduced? Were there any topics that you needed a lot of help with in open lab hours?
    • Are there any topics you still don't understand?
    • Do the things you understand / don't understand have anything in common?

  2. Review the topics you struggled with by going back through lectures and recitations, reworking parts of p-sets and labs where you needed a lot of help, coming to open lab hours and asking for review, etc. and add things to your reference sheet as you go. You might also find it useful to take each topic you'd like to gain better understanding of and list the main concepts and summarize them in a sentence. Would you be able to teach these concepts in-depth to another student who has never heard of it before? If not, spend time summarizing the material in your own words as though you were going to teach it to someone else.

  3. Take a practice exam under actual exam conditions including time limit and limited resources. While you take the exam, try applying the following test-taking strategies:

    • Glance through the exam before doing any work
    • Read the instructions carefully
    • Complete the questions you're most confident in first
    • Budget your time (don't get stuck on any problem for too long - skip it and come back to it later after completing other parts of the exam.)
    • Stop yourself when time is up

  4. Compare your practice exam against the solutions and think about what you did well and what you could improve, with a goal of identifying areas you should focus on in the next round of studying (or identifying things that went wrong on a meta-level, time management, etc.) If you don't understand the solution to a particular problem, try running the code on your computer, coming to open lab hours, or emailing 6.200-help with specific questions.

  5. After taking a practice exam and identifying areas to study, go back to step 2 and repeat the process.

Note that this process is not designed to take place over a single day or the night before the exam! Research has shown that cramming (studying a lot right before the exam) is less effective than studying consistently for shorter periods over time.1


 
Footnotes

1 Relevant article: Rawson, K. A., & Dunlosky, J. (2011). Optimizing schedules of retrieval practice for durable and efficient learning: How much is enough? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140(3), 283–302. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023956 (click to return to text)