CSC148 February 9th 2015

The highlight of last week's CSC148 is the first midterm of this semester.  Having gone to Danny's lecture for 165 last semester, I had a pretty good idea of what I should be expecting, and i was very nervous before the test because truthfully i feel like i haven't learned a whole lot of new stuff since the beginning of this semester.  As i recall, the first 165 midterm was a simple, yet difficult test to me, and i didn't do particularly well on it either.  After reading over the lecture slides as well as the lab handouts multiple times, i felt like i had a good grasp of what will be tested, mainly writing classes and subclasses, and a bit of recursion tracing as well.  The test itself was surprisingly simple, and did not require much "smart" thinking.  Practice from assignment one on writing classes and subclasses certainly helped me feel at home as i worked through questions 1 and 3 on the test.  The recursion tracing bit was also pretty simple, as long as i took the time to write out the steps instead of being lazy and trying to cut corners.  However after writing the test, i realise that i misunderstood a method in the first question, which many cost me a fair bit of points.  The method that Professor Heap intended us to write was one which stores information passed in as arguments into an object attribute.  When i read the question, i thought that i was required to also prompt the user to give an answer as part of the method, and so my code was unnecessarily long.  The lesson that i have learned from this is to read each question description thoroughly, and never assume i know what i am asked to do and skip reading the latter part of the question.