A list of common mistakes that have been found in some exams. The following is a list of things that you should not do.
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Handing in reports more than 3 pages long. Ensure that you have at most 3 pages, all included.
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Not invest enough time/effort in the report. Having a bad or good report influenced the final grade in many cases.
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Not really using concurrency. Some just ran multiple threads, each running a copy of the same sequential algorithm. This is not the objective of the exam. The objective is to use concurrency to optimise the execution of the algorithm.
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Making an algorithm that works for only one file instead of visiting all files in the target directory.
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Changing the interfaces given in the skeleton program for the exam. You cannot change the types of the methods or the interface given for the exam. Interfaces need to be implemented via classes that you create.
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Not removing the
throw new UnsupportedMethodException()statement given in the skeleton program for the exam after a method has been implemented. -
Changing the return type or the parameter types of the methods given in the skeleton program for the exam.
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Not taking care of race conditions on shared data structures. Some projects used shared data structures to accumulate results during execution, but without using proper synchronisation. As a result, some projects behaved erratically: some times they would work, some times they would not.