CSCI 265 Software Engineering Midterm and Final exam

Midterm

There will be one midterm, worth 20% of the final grade.

The midterm is written (paper/pencil), closed notes and closed book, no electronics permitted, and conducted in the regular lecture time on Monday October 26. Students will be permitted one double-sided 8.5"x11" 'cheat sheet'. (The cheat sheet does not have to be handwritten.)

The midterm is intended to take roughly 80 minutes to complete, and will cover all the course, lab, and project material up to and including Friday October 23rd.

A review session will be held the week prior to the midterm, with topics and practice material posted on this page.

Here are examples of some past final/midterm/quiz questions that would be relevant for this year's midterm (since we changed the order of topics this year).

Final exam replacing midterm: the student's midterm mark can be replaced by their final exam mark if their final exam mark is higher.

Individual work: as with all work in this course, midterms and finals must be strictly individual efforts. The student is not permitted to seek or accept assistance from other individuals or sources (including AI-supported tools) in completing any portion of an exam. Similarly, students are not permitted to provide assistance to other students in completing any portion of an exam. Note that VIU policies consider both parties to be committing academic misconduct in such situations, and both parties may incur the resuling penalties.

Final exam

The final exam will be worth 40% of your total grade and will be held as an in person written exam in the gym during the formal VIU exam period (date, time, and location TBA).

The exam will be closed notes, closed book, no electronics permitted, but you are permitted one 8.5" by 11" 'cheat sheet' of notes. This can be of your own design, no restrictions on the content. (It does not have to be handwritten.)

The format will be ten questions, all equal weight, with a heavy emphasis on discussion and justify-your-answer styles of question.

A review session will be held in the final lecture prior to the final exam, and the material covered will consist of course all material up to and including the review session, including all lectures, quizzes, project components, etc.

While the exam can draw on any area of the course, some of the key focus areas for this year's exam will be software development life cycles, requirements/specifications and design, version control, code reviews and inspections, testing and automation, and the use of AI in software development.

You will be expected to be able to plan/discuss the use of git for version control, but detailed knowledge of specific command syntax is not expected. (Essentially know which commands are used for which purposes, and the circumstances under which they are/are not appropriate.)

Similarly, you will be expected to be able to plan/discuss the use of bash for automation, but detailed knowledge of specific bash syntax is not expected. (Essentially you should be able to work at a pseudo-code level of bash.)

Unlike some past exams, there will be no focus on makefiles, C++, or bash scripting in this year's final.

OLD EXAMS

Note that the material covered and order of topics varies from year to year (perl in particular was covered extensively in earlier years), so don't be alarmed if some of the questions cover material we haven't touched on.

Below are some older 265 final exams.
2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 , 2023, 2024, 2025