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Exam

Exam assignments​

Year 2023/24​

Year 2022/23​

Year 2021/22​

Year 2020/21​

Exam rules​

The Web Applications I (WA1)/Applicazioni Web I (AW1) exam will be as described in the following. The exam consists of a web application project to be developed according to the specifications published 20 days in advance of each official exam date ("data appello"), plus an oral discussion of such a project. For each official date, a new assignment will have to be developed.

The web application project must be developed during the 20 days by each student INDIVIDUALLY. During the oral exam, each student should be able to prove that they were able to develop the project in full autonomy by showing complete and full knowledge of every part of their submitted solution. The final version of the project must be submitted before the deadline, according to the provided technical instructions. If such instructions are not carefully followed, the exam will be considered failed. This includes, for instance, if the project cannot be run and tested as-is by the teacher with the required configuration.

A few days after publishing the assignment, the teachers will be available to discuss potential doubts about it (e.g., unclear or ambiguous requirements). Any interested student will be able to ask questions asynchronously. After such a clarification phase, a "final" version of the text will be published.

The submission deadline for the project is 23:59 of the day before the official exam date. For submitting the exam, it is mandatory to enroll in the exam booking ("Prenotazione Esami"). The students admitted to the exam will be those that are correctly enrolled AND have turned in the project before the deadline. There will be no penalty for students who enroll but do not submit the project (they will be marked as "absent").

The submitted projects will evaluated during the oral discussion. The evaluation criteria for the submitted project will be functional completeness, absence of unhandled errors, client-server organization, component architecture according to the React guidelines, and clarity and organization of the code.

Each student will be allocated a time slot for the discussion, that will take place in person starting from the official exam date. Some form of identification (ID card or passport, etc.) is required. The oral exam aims to ensure that each student has developed the web application by themselves and to evaluate how much the student can explain the exact behavior of the code. The source code will be opened on the teacher's computer. Therefore, during the oral exam, the student must be able to explain every aspect of the project. This includes, but is not limited to, the reasons behind the architectural choices for their application, how any specific fragment of code works, why it was implemented in that way, what alternatives could have been used, etc. The evaluation criteria for the oral will be theoretical and practical knowledge of the project design, theoretical and practical knowledge of the project codebase, readiness, and clarity in the replies. If it emerges that the student does not have mastery of the written code, the exam will be immediately canceled, without a numerical evaluation.

There will be 26 marks assigned to the project and 4 to the oral discussion. Up to 2 extra points are available for students whose projects demonstrate a high quality and for the richness and precision of the answers during the discussion.

Since the exam is essentially the design of an application with rather generic specifications, it is not acceptable that the submitted solutions are excessively similar among them, which would indicate that the solution has not been developed autonomously. Similarity checks will be run after the deadline. In this case, the exam will be considered failed, and the students will be notified about the situation.

Recommendations

During the oral exam, each student must be able to immediately find and carefully explain any part of the code in the project that implements a given feature asked by the teacher. Therefore, we recommended that the student carefully rehearse and review the code shortly before the oral exam.

As in any programming assignment, it is possible to search online for suggestions and examples about solving specific programming issues during the development phase, which can be incorporated into the final solution. However, regardless of the source, the student MUST be able to explain how the code submitted as the final solution works, regardless of the source (online examples, templates, etc.).

In the solution, it is recommended to employ all the good practices and sound programming techniques explained during the course. Substantial deviations from such patterns will have to be duly justified during the oral exam. If not adequately justified, they will cause a reduction of the final mark and potentially a failed exam. Regarding the use of external libraries/templates/modules: as a general rule, the use of the techniques shown during the classes is preferred. The use of external modules and libraries for functions such as date/time handling, presentation aspects, predefined components (e.g., calendars), and similar items are allowed.

If React requires certain programming patterns, those must be followed. For example, it is NOT allowed to use jQuery or JS directly to modify DOM content within the browser. It is not allowed to use server-side technologies other than those shown in the classes: express, with SQLite to implement DB access, and the React internal web server must be used. Also, remember that the solution MUST be submitted in a way that can be readily tested by the teacher with the commands specified in the technical instructions.