<p>I am a CS major at a 4 year college. My CS teacher did something out of the ordinary that I would NEVER expect a CS professor to do. He went through all of the questions from the final he gave last year and he also made the final available online for use by the whole class. </p>
<p>Part of taking a test is to understand the professor and the material on it. Would it be safe to say that he wont include ANY of the same questions from last years exam? I want to use last years exam to study. It is just unordinary and it is stressing me out because I need to maintain my in major GPA at a 3.0</p>
<p>Many of my professors put old exams online. They encourage students to practice the old tests, look over the solutions, etc. I think it’s helpful, it lets students figure out what to expect (will the problems be straightforward, theoretical, proofs, calculations? will you be writing code?) and it gives them a sense of how the professor words their problems.</p>
<p>Whether or not they’ll reuse questions, well, that probably depends on the professor. You might see similar problems framed differently, they might put an identical question with different numbers, or it could be all new problems. Honestly no one except for the professor’ll know what the exam looks like.</p>
<p>Anyways, no reason not to study off the old exam, seeing as he gave it to you as a study tool. You should also be sure to study the class material though, and make sure you remember all the topics you’ve learned.</p>
<p>It would not surprise me if you see something repeated verbatim. Consider it a gift to those students who took the time to actually review and understand the past exam.</p>
<p>Son had a professor that was so annoyed at students skipping that he announced an quiz and went over the problems that would be on the quiz in the class prior to the quiz. Those that skipped the class missed the gift.</p>
<p>Use what you are given and what you have available to you.</p>
<p>Very true, since all assignments have been turned in many people have skipped class. Thinking about it, he told us EXACT things to refresh ourselves on. Not only that he said that the form will be the same, so my guess is the questions will change. The thing is professors can be very unpredicatable, usually in a bad way.</p>
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<p>Why is this such a surprise?</p>
<p>Some schools or departments make old exams publicly accessible, so that access is equalized (i.e. no advantage to the hidden exam files in fraternity houses or whatever) and instructors are not tempted to be lazy and reuse old exam questions.</p>
<p>[Exams</a> | Department of Mathematics at University of California Berkeley](<a href=“http://math.berkeley.edu/courses/archives/exams]Exams”>Exams | Department of Mathematics)
<a href=“https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/exams/[/url]”>https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/exams/</a>
<a href=“https://tbp.berkeley.edu/students/exams/[/url]”>https://tbp.berkeley.edu/students/exams/</a></p>
<p>The publicly accessible old exams can also be helpful for new frosh with AP or IB credit who want to check their knowledge when deciding whether to skip an introductory course using their AP or IB credit.</p>
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<p>I had this once. Best quiz ever.</p>
<p>While most of my professors didn’t provide old exams, I did have one that would, and he told us every exam would have one problem directly off of an old exam. Similarly, I’ve also had professors that would always use one problem directly from the homework (Generally a tougher one most people got wrong; that way it would benefit the people that go back and study the solution sets to understand what they did wrong.).</p>
<p>My chem teacher did this. He gave us a past exam and most of the questions were the same, but the numbers were changed so it was the same general idea, all you had to know was the concepts.</p>
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<p>Almost every EECS class I’ve ever taken has given past exams and I have never seen a repeated question from these. Sometimes questions will be of a similar format, but never the same one.</p>
<p>I’ve taken 11 EECS classes.</p>
<p>Old exams are most useful for helping you figure out what you need to study more.</p>
<p>My physics professor made every past midterm/exam since like 1995 available online to study from. When I took the final, I’d say I recognised around 80% of the questions (although sometimes they were modified a little, i.e. a ball being dropped as opposed to a car driving off a cliff when talking about momentum etc)</p>
<p>That said, this was physics for non-science people…</p>