does anyone else feel like the entry exam for SE-Lab was rather unfair? The exam (its tasks in particular) contained so many mistakes that the tutors had to announce new corrections every 10 minutes, which was extremely disruptive. In my case, I started with the second task and got very confused because the task’s description was completely different from the start of the solution placed on the paper on the next page. By the time the correction was announced, I had already finished that exercise and didn’t have time to adjust my solution.
On top of that, the solutions in our prep material (tutorial sheets and the mock exam) also contained mistakes. This made the preparation for the exam even harder, considering we didn’t have much time anyway. Moreover, the actual exam was drastically harder and its tasks were not similar to the mock exam at all, which made the provided prep material feel very misleading.
Mistakes are unfortunate, but can happen to everyone. I also think that the exam could (should) have been reviewed better before to catch such mistakes though.
I personally think it was clear from the task that you had to do what was announced as the correction, but I get that that is definitely frustrating.
For those, if they haven’t been noticed by/been pointed out during a tutorial, I think it could help if you could post mistakes you spot on the forum (people did this in Prog 2 and it helped a lot). This forum does not have a “feedback” category like Prog 2 did, so I’m not sure if this is wanted, but I think it is useful.
I disagree. I would consider the exam easier than the mock exam. For example, you didn’t have to draw a huge class diagram like in mock exercise 2, just extend an existing one in the beginning, and the ones in the last task could also be rather small.
In what ways do you think the mock exam was harder?
In my opinion, the exam was an appropriate test of the skills needed to participate in the group phase. I agree the learning time is a bit short, but many OOP concepts should already have been familiar from Prog2 and transferring the knowledge from there to Kotlin also should not be too difficult if you actually did the projects.