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Comprehensive exams are given to students during their senior year at Georgetown College and are generally scheduled early in the spring.  The exams are two hours in length covering  material from courses required for the major and are either national standardized tests (ETS Field test) or department-constructed exams.   Mathematics, physics and computer science students take the ETS test (a passing score is the 50th percentile.)  Engineering students take a departmental exam covering mathematics and physics courses.  Information Systems majors take a departmental exam (a passing score is 60%.)  (MIS majors take an exam from the Business Dept. and a one-hour departmental exam in computer science.)

For a listing of the material covered by the ETS Field tests and for sample questions go to the ETS web site: www.ets.org and click on Major Field Tests.

Study guides for the mathematics comprehensive are calculus, linear algebra, abstract algebra, and real analysis.

Engineering students should study the material from PHY 111, 112, 241, 313, 317, 318 and from MAT 121, 122, 221, 322.  Chemical engineers should see Dr. David Bowman for their course list.  A study guide for the calculus portion of the exam is here.

The Information Systems test (2 hours) covers the following five courses and topics.  One portion of the exam will be a programming section based on programming skills developed throughout the program.

I.  CSC115-215

1.  Primitive data types 

2.  Operators including Arithmetic, Equality, Relational, Logical, Assignment, Increment and Decrement operators

3.  Control structures including if, switch, while, do-while, for, break, continue

4.  Functions including prototypes, parameters, reference parameters, floor, ceil, abs, sqrt

5.  Dynamic allocation including the use of new and delete

6.  Stream I/O including cin, cout, insertion and extraction, File I/O, open, close, get, put

7.  Data structures including arrays, structs, classes

8.  Character strings and string functions

9.  Preprocessor commands including #include, #define, #ifndef, #endif

10.  Program organization including .cpp files, header file, comments

II. CSC215

1. Distinguish between the interface and the implementation of a data structure as an abstract data type.
2. For the following data structures, know: interface, pertinent characteristics such as complexity of insertions and deletions, strategies for implementation (including pros and cons). In addition, be able to select the appropriate data structures for given problems.
1. Lists
2. Stacks, Queues and Dequeues
3. Trees

                             i.      Binary search trees (including different traversal strategies)

                             ii.      General trees

                             iii.      Trees with specific properties, especially Heaps, less likely balanced trees.

4. Graphs

                             i.      Directed vs. undirected

                            ii.      Adjacency matrix versus adjacency list

5. Associative structures (hash tables)
2. The concept and issues of generic programming.
3. The following are excluded from the test:
1. Syntax of C++ templates (although a general understanding will be useful for discussing generic programming)
2. Language specific application program interfaces such as the STL in C++, or various container classes in Java.

III.  CSC304 Algorithms

1.  Analysis of algorithms including time complexity and Big-O, recurrence relations.

2.  Recursion

3.   Elementary sorting algorithms including bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort.

4.  Advanced sorting algorithms including quicksort, merge sort, radix sort.

5.  External sorting

6.  Sequential search and binary search

7.  Hashing

IV.  CSC450 - Study your class notes from Prof. Crawley's class

 V.  CSC405

1.  If given a description of a database be able to draw an entity-relationship diagram, give a relational scheme (eg:  table names and attributes), give a relational instance.

2.  Be able to select, project and join relations to form queries in relational algebra.

4.  Know the definition of (and be able to recognize) primary keys, superkeys, candidate keys and foreign keys.

3.  Know functional dependencies and how they relate to normalization up to 3NF and BCNF.

6.  Be able to do a lossless (join) decomposition into BCNF.

7.  Be able to write basic queries in SQL.

The MIS test (1 hour) covers CSC304 Algorithms, CSC405 Database Management, CSC450 Software Engineering.  The passing grade is 60%.  See the course outlines for the Information Systems test.  

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