Exam

Exam

The course content will be tested in the form of a computer exam, consisting of a theoretical part (on campus, 1 hour), and a practical part (take-home exam, 2 hours).

Date & time

Main sit

  • Theoretical part (on campus, max. 1 hour): Tuesday, 4 April 2023 (1pm-3.15pm)
  • Practical part (take home, max. 2 hours): Monday, 3 April 2023 (2pm-4pm)
  • Exam registration: via Osiris

Resit

  • Theoretical part (on campus, max. 1 hour): Wednesday, 28 June 2023 (time tba)
  • Practical part (take home, max. 2 hours): Tuesday, 27 June 2023 (2pm-4pm)
  • Exam registration: via Osiris

Technicalities & support

  • Receiving your exam: via TestVision on the examination dates.
  • The exam consists of two parts, which you will have to work on in “separate” exams:
    • The theoretical part needs to be finished within one hour (for timings, see Osiris).
    • The practical part is open for two hours (exact timing tba).
  • Working on your exam: on a computer at the University (theoretical part, on campus), on your computer (practical part, take-home).
  • Submitting your exam: all questions (including file uploads) will be submitted via TestVision
  • Support during the practical part of the exam: preferably WhatsApp see support section of this website; Support only for “unforeseen” errors. No support will be given for technical issues that students should have solved during the course (e.g., installation of R or make, installing packages, running Python code in an automated workflow, etc.)

Form

  • On-campus exam (theoretical part, closed book except selected course material that students can download on the instruction page of the exam), and open book take-home exam (practical part; i.e., for this part, you can access any material you find helpful, including material you have stored on your computers, or that you find on the internet).
  • Several sections with subquestions (all open questions; both in written, or by means of code/file uploads)
  • Some questions will be personalized (i.e., there is only one correct answer per student)
  • Communication with anybody about the exam content, during and after the take-home exam, is strictly prohibited.
  • Students must not copy-paste from websites, academic papers. The use of ChatGPT or similar AI-based tools is only allowed if stated explicitly for selected questions on the pratical part of the exam.
  • Students must not mention their names or student numbers in any of the submitted files, except when being explicitly asked to do so. This is to ensure the exam can be graded anonymously.

Content

Theoretical part

  • This part of the exam consists of personalized open and closed (multiple-choice) questions, shown in random order (i.e., not in order of difficulty or weight/points).
  • The content is predominately focused on the workflow for collecting web data ( “Fields of Gold” paper).
  • Students can go freely back and forth between questions in this part.
  • Cognitive skills that will be tested are knowledge, comprehension, and analysis.

Practical part

  • This part of the exam consists of personalized open questions, shown in random order (i.e., not in order of difficulty or weight/points).
  • Students can go freely back and forth between questions in this part.
  • Allocate 2 hours to work on this part, which focuses on all learning goals of the course as practiced in the tutorials.
  • Expect three broad questions
    • Small coding task (e.g., parsing, fixing errors, running existing code) (20 minutes)
    • Small essay to form a judgment (e.g., recommend website or API for a particular business problem, evaluate terms & conditions, sample size calculations) (15 minutes)
    • Large(r) coding task (e.g., scrape data from a website or retrieve data from API) (remaining time)
  • Cognitive skills that will be tested are application, evaluation, and synthesis/creation.
  • All tutorials (except advanced web scraping and advanced APIs are relevant for this part of the exam).

Preparing for the exam

Work on the example questions

Please view the list of example questions here.

Make your own example questions

  • We encourage you to generate your own example questions. Just start from a combination of learning goals (e.g., learn how to scrape, “web scraping 101”) and cognitive skill levels (e.g., “evaluation”). Combining these two dimensions will help you come up with a creative way of asking a good example question.
  • See this summary of Bloom’s Taxonomy, which we also use to generate exam questions.
  • Curious whether your question is “good” - send it to us via the usual ways - maybe it will even be part of the exam? ;)

Familiarize yourself with TestVision

Technical tips & beyond

  • Verify your software setup (you should be able to run all Jupyter Notebooks/tutorials on your own computer)
  • Know how to zip and unzip files
  • Make use of cheat sheets (e.g., available on this site or elsewhere) (you can also print them)
  • Revise your code before submission in part 2 so that you ensure it runs from top to bottom without problems.