Date, Time, Venue

Date: 25 October 2020 (Sunday)

Check-in time at Zoom: 1:15pm
Exam start-time: 1:30pm
Stop-writing time: 4:30pm
Submission deadline: 4:50pm

(All are GMT+8)

Please arrive at Zoom before 1:15pm. We will take a photo of every student for verification before the exam starts.
You should do the test at your dorm or at home. If it is not ideal, you may find a public venue with reliable internet connection, but you need to check the opening hours and make sure the venue allows you to use your phone/camera for recording.
Obey the mask law of the venue -- for HKUST library you should put the mask on, but you will be asked to take it off temporarily for few seconds for identity verification before the test.

Zoom IDs

Only enrolled students and officially audit students are allowed to take the test. Unofficial audit students can download the paper for your own entertainment after the exam is over.

Zoom ID: 982 6116 0973
Passcode:114514

Things to bring

Paper and pen/pencil
A good scanning phone app, or a scanner, that can output PDF effectively and clearly
Webcam or phone cam (see the setup below)
You may use iPad note-taking app* but you should notice there is a risk of your iPad breaking down during the test.
Brain

*Remark about the use of iPad: You should only use your iPad for writing, and avoid typing anything on the iPad. To avoid being suspected of cheating, you should use your desktop/laptop (with the screen captured by the camera) for searching the internet and looking up for course materials.

Coverage

Everything covered before the midterm, yet materials on 19-23/10 will occupy at most 5% of the points.

Format

Similar to Fall 2017: about 25-35% on short, conceptual questions, and 65-75% on longer, structured questions.

Allowed materials

The exam will be:

open notes
You can look at the lecture notes, any materials posted online, and your own notes and homework during the exams.
open resources, open internet:
You can read any reference books, online or offline. You can also search the internet for references and idea. In any case, only results proved or discussed in the course can be directly used.

However, absolutely NO discussion with any person (whether HKUST members or not) during the exam. Discussion includes online chatting. All questions should be addressed to the instructor and TAs only (in the private chat in Zoom). Any unauthorized discussion, online or offline, is a serious violation of the HKUST Academic Honor Code.

Posting anything (course related or not) in any social media (Facebook, Twitter, Goops, LIHKG, ZhiHu, Quora, Chegg, etc.) during the exam, whether or not it gets any response or likes, is also counted as discussion, and hence is strictly prohibited.

You need to arrange your webcam or phone cam so that the instructor can see a picture of you, the workspace, and the computer. See the picture below. Of course, don't censor your face like below. For detail university regulation about online proctored exam, please read this document.

Screenshot 2020-09-05 at 1.15.11 AM.png

Other Dos and Don'ts

During the exam, you can:

Request a toilet break by private messaging the instructor in Zoom. The instructor may allow only one student going to the toilet at one time.
Ask whether a certain theorem/proposition/lemma/corollary could be used without proof, and/or without citations. Send a private message to the instructor in Zoom.
Use your computer for searching materials and looking up references.

In addition to the regulations stated above, you cannot do the following:

You should not open irrelevant websites such as Facebook, Weibo, etc. that could cause suspicion of attempted cheating. Please also turn OFF all pop-up notifications.
You should not view other students' camera view in Zoom. You can only enlarge the instructor's shared-screen or his camera view in Zoom, and should keep all other students' camera views as minimized as possible (so that you cannot see clearly their writings and computer screen content).

Marking

(Conceptual) accuracy, logical reasoning, and clarity are the three important factors when it comes to marking. In all your solutions:

You should try to supply reasons for all non-trivial steps -- especially if the step is based on early results that appeared several lines before.
Present your solutions logically and coherently. Do not give us some fragments of mathematical equations and symbols that do not make any sense when they are put together. All irrelevant steps that hurt the logical coherence should be crossed out. Unlike the IMO and some competitions grading, solutions with irrelevant parts that cause confusions would NOT be awarded full credits even if the rest of the solution is perfect.
It is your benefit to write down your solutions so that a good math major (say the top 10% in HKUST) could understand. If ALL of the instructor, and the two TAs could not understand your solution, it would be treated as "unreadable" and we will only award very little points to your solution.
If you cannot do the problem completely, try to do some special cases with extra assumptions. Some partial credits could be awarded, but how much to be awarded will depend on whether or not the special cases or extra assumptions made the problem trivial or easy.

Sick leave or emergency policy

For sick leave, please provide a proof by a registered doctor in your region. A doctor statement dated before the midterm will be necessary. If the statement is not written in Chinese, English, Japanese, German or French, please provide us with an English translation.

For emergency, please contact me immediately by phone (+852 6898 0086) or Email (frederick.fong@ust.hk)

In ALL cases, early exam will be given the same (or almost the same) paper. All late exams, regardless of causes, will be given a different paper. While we will do the best to maintain the level of difficulty for the late exams, there is no guarantee.