Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Spring Semester, 2008
6.01: Introduction to EECS I

Comments on Nanoquiz 2

Most people did well on the first half of nanoquiz 2, however, there seemed to be widespread misunderstanding of the second half. We placed most of the weight of the points on the first question All nanoquizzes are graded out of 5 points. The first question was graded out of 4 points and the second one out of 2 points. So, some people will get more than 5, the extra points will count as extra credit. The initial grading assumed that both questions would be waited equally (2.5 and 2.5) and so you may see some grading that reflects this division but these were later renormalized as described above.

Here are some comments on issues revealed by the quiz answers. While we didn't necessarily take points off for all of these, they are nonetheless worth paying attention to:

Problem 1: List comprehension

Quite a few people had trouble writing a list comprehension; this is an important technique that you should practice.

The use of reduce seemed to trip some people up.

Problem 2: Non-deterministic behavior

The focus here was on the definition of a non-deterministic behavior - a function that takes one input (the sensors) and always returns a Python set (of actions). The behavior is called non-deterministic because it returns one or more possible actions to be performed. The most common mistake was that people missed the fact that a behavior is a function with a particular input and output, not a set.