C949 OA V4

Hey everyone, I just passed the OA on my second attempt. Here are my suggestions for v4 of this class. I don't really post anything about courses because what others posted is usually enough, but this class, out of every other class, challenged me the most because PA is misleading.

First of all, in this version of the class, PA is much easier than OA, so you need to pass the PA with exemplary, and even then, the OA will be quite challenging. As with every other OA, its wording is tricky, but also in this course, you get hit by unexpected depths of each section. So PA is quite shallow, but OA goes in depth.

I agree with other posts: you have to learn Big O, lower and upper bounds, and how to calculate worst-case runtimes; there are many questions in this area. However, what will challenge you the most is the pseudocodes for singly, doubly, and circular lists. Make sure to know how to identify the head and the tail for each case because the questions in this area will be quite tricky and challenging. Use ChatGPT to drill this section, trust me. 

The second area I'd recommend is ADT operations, such as enqueue, dequeue, push, remove, and pop. Do not just learn what they do; learn in which cases they are used. For instance, enqueue and dequeue are used in a queue. Again, drill this section with ChatGPT. There will be several questions combining both the lists I mentioned above and ADTs. You might think you got both of them down, but if you can't read the pseudocode properly, you will easily fail those questions. For instance, in one of the pseudocode questions, an add function was identified, and if I didn't pay attention, I would miss that question. It had add(10), add(20), add(30), and one specific line about the add function helped me find the head of the list it was asking. So make sure you know the structure of lists. I failed my first OA because of this, but in the first OA, pseudocodes were simpler.

And lastly, as others mentioned, know Big Os and best, average, and worst cases for each sorting algorithm. 

Even though I got exemplary on the PA, I only got competent on the OA. Do your best to pass the OA on your first try because assignments for reattempt take so much time.

Use whatever AI(ChatGPT, Gemini, etc) to study and drill each section. I downloaded the results for PA and imported them to ChatGPT and made it generate questions based on that, and also the study guide v4. But specifically give a prompt to ChatGPT to increase the difficulty of the questions so they will be worded as tricky as the OA.

GOOD LUCK!!