Exam

Exam#

The point of the exam is to ensure you were doing the following throughout the course:

If both of those are the case, you will likely:

  • Do well on the exam without a huge amount of studying

  • Finish before the time limit

Format#

  • The exam will contain:

    • Fill-in-the-blank

    • Matching

    • Free response questions

      • Coding

        • The syntax isn’t expected to be perfect.

      • High-level

  • It will be “closed book”, meaning no:

    • Web browsing

    • Apps

    • Cheat sheets

    • Phones

    • etc.

  • It will be done online (in-person, synchronously) through Respondus LockDown Browser.

    • To save time, installing this in advance is recommended.

    • This is being used to prevent access to other tabs/apps.

    • While it can be used to collect location, video, etc., this is disabled.

    • You only need this for the exam itself; it can be uninstalled afterwards.

Topics#

The following is in scope for the exam:

  • Python fundamentals

    • Types

    • Variables

    • Conditionals

    • Functions

  • pandas data structures

  • Jupyter concepts

  • Markdown basics

  • Data manipulation

    • Boolean indexing

    • Aggregation (count/sum/mean)

    • Grouping

    • Cleaning

    • Merging

  • Troubleshooting

  • Data visualization

    • Choosing chart types

    • Chart hygiene

  • Time series

    • Resampling

  • APIs, conceptually

Example questions#

Recommendation: Try completing them without using a search engine, generative AI, the course materials, etc.

  • What is the value of y after the following code is executed?

    x = 5
y = 2 * x
x = 50

  • What will the following code print?

    x = 0
numbers = [1, 3, 5, 9]
for i in numbers:
    if i > 2:
        x = x + 1
print(x)

  • What types can a pandas column be? Come up with at least three.

  • What are some scenarios where you’d need to deal with types in pandas? Come up with at least three.

  • How do you make a link in Markdown?

  • How does groupby() work?

  • What is resampling used for? Include an example.

  • What’s a choropleth map? Try explaining to someone who’s never seen one before.

  • What are the different kinds of merges? Can describe through text and/or visuals.

  • How would you merge the following Dataframes? Write the code as best you can.

    intros

    Name

    Year introduced

    Mickey Mouse

    1928

    Big Bird

    1969

    Lisa Simpson

    1987

    shows

    First

    Last

    Series

    Lisa

    Simpson

    The Simpsons

    Mickey

    Mouse

    multiple

    Big

    Bird

    Sesame Street

  • Why would you use an API?

  • Suppose you have this JSON stored in a candidates variable. Write code to retrieve the name.

    {
  "results": [{ "name": "Jimmy McMillan", "first_file_date": "2010-01-01" }]
}