News
Final Exam Regulations & Technical Test on Thursday
Written on 16.02.2021 16:36 by Christian Schön
Dear students,
we have finally determined the exact regulations for the upcoming exam:
- The exam itself will be planned for 120 minutes (as initially also planned for the exam in presence). You will get an extra 30 minutes to download the exam in the beginning and to digitize your solution in the end, i.e. a total of 2 hours and 30 minutes
- As soon as the exam starts, you will be able to download your personalized exam on this webpage by entering your matriculation number and solving a captcha: https://playground.bigdata.uni-saarland.de/ (this website will also be linked in the CMS under "Information")
- As all your requests will arrive at our webserver within a short time, it might take a few seconds for the webserver to distribute all exams, so please be patient if you do not immediately receive your PDF
- The final submission will happen in the CMS. We will generate a submission where you can upload your solution as PDF file. You will find the submission linked on your personal status page. The maximum file size might be restricted by the server, we are currently discussing that with the administrators and will publish a possible limit later this week. UPDATE: The maximum file size allowed in the CMS will be 256 MB, which should be more than enough. But keep in mind that the time required for the upload highly depends on the upload speed of your local internet connection and the file size.
- The solution must be handed in before the deadline, so make sure you plan enough time to digitize your solution and to upload it to the CMS. We will not accept late submissions! In case of e.g. technical problems with the CMS, immediately contact us and make screenshots of possible error messages to prove that you actually tried to upload your solution in time.
- It is up to you to decide how you solve the exercises: E.g. printing them out, writing the solutions by hand and scanning them afterwards vs directly writing on a tablet using an appropriate pencil. Just make sure your solutions are legible in the end and you clearly state where to find the solutions for each exercise!
- We will be available on Discord to answer questions during the exam. In case you need a clarification on one of the exercises, you can join the "Exam Lobby" voice channel. One of the tutors will then take you to a private channel where you can ask your question. If you don’t have a working microphone, you can instead send a private text message to Christian Schön (don't post questions in one of the public channels). If one of the students finds a bug in one of the exercises, we will post a clarification in the “exam” text channel on Discord. So keep an eye on messages in this channel during the exam to be up to date.
- Maybe prepare a fallback plan in case your internet connection breaks. One possibility is a mobile hotspot through your smartphone which is usually easy to setup on Android and iOS devices.
- We will not have any form of surveillance e.g. via webcam (as we would have in a regular exam at university). We will therefore check the exams for plagiarism (which will result in a failed exam), so don’t even try to trick us!
To check that everything works as expected, we have organized a small technical test which will be held on Thursday, February 18th on 1 pm CET. You will have half an hour (exactly the extra time in the actual exam) to download your personalized test exam, to write down your name on the front page, to answer a very simple and short exercise (not related to or representative for the actual exam) and to finally upload your solution to a test submission in the CMS.
We highly recommend to take part in this test and to check that you are well prepared.
We also highly recommend to really go through the whole process of downloading, working on the exam and uploading the solution to get a feeling how long e.g. scanning the exam, converting it to a PDF and uploading it to the CMS really takes. Keep in mind that the actual exam will be longer, you will therefore also need more time to scan the actual exam than you will need for the test exam. You might also need some extra time to minimize the file size of your PDF for the actual exam (e.g. by lowering the resolution of your scanner or camera). So better take some time to experiment with these scenarios before the exam.
If you have questions regarding these regulations or experience problems during the test, please contact us as soon as possible such that we can solve all these problems before the actual exam starts.
Best regards
Christian