CS 1705 Credit By Examination (CBE) for Fall 2008

Students may obtain credit for CS 1705 by completing a programming project and taking an examination, obtaining a score of at least 70% on both.  The program specification and additional details are available below.

The examination will be given on Monday, August 25 from 5:00 to 6:30 in McBryde Hall, room 632. Students must send email to barnette@vt.edu no later than August 18 indicating their decision to attempt to test out of CS 1705.

Students must obtain a credit-by-examination form, (CS Dept office in Torgerson Hall room 2050), and follow the instructions on that form.  The programming project and CBE payment must be completed prior to attempting the examination, and you must bring the corresponding credit-by-exam payment receipt paperwork to the exam.

Students may elect to use any Java development environment they wish. It is recommended that they employ the customized BlueJ environment used in CS 1705. Access the installation and download instructions page. VT-BlueJ is available for free download from the CS 1705 Web site. Students must download the latest ver. 220-200, (replacing any older version they have used previously). Student's needing an introduction to BlueJ may access the on-line BlueJ Tutorial.

Solutions must be submitted on-line to the Web-CAT (Web Computer Automated Testing) system. The BlueJ environment contains an integrated Web-CAT submission facility. The Web-CAT system is a TDD (Test Driven Development) based system. The BlueJ IDE support TDD through JUnit integration. Students not familiar with Test-First based program development should read and work through the Unit Testing in BlueJ tutorial. The course notes on TDD and Web-CAT are also available. The JUnit API class documentation is available on-line. Web-CAT requires students to submit unit test classes with their classes to ensure the correct functionality of their solution. Student solutions must include thorough testing code and pass the Web-CAT reference test cases for the problem.

Optionally, students choosing not to use BlueJ will need to download the CS 1705 Package: cs1705.jar (v2.11 11/14/2007) and install it on their development Java path to use any of the CS 1705 package classes for the project, (although none are required to complete this project). Documentation for the CS 1705 package API is available on-line. (See the cs1705.jar Java Input-Output tutorial.) Non-BlueJ submissions must be made directly to the Web-CAT server through its web interface. Note that all the files for the project must be compressed into a Java jar archive for submission.

Code from the standard Sun Java API and the cs1705.jar may be used in the solution. All other code used in the solution must be produced by the student. (Use of code not in the Java API, the cs1705.jar or not produced by the student is a Va Tech Honor violation.)

The CS 1705 textbook is Objects First with Java: A Practical Introduction using BlueJ, 3rd Edition, David J. Barnes and Michael Kölling, Prentice Hall, 2006.