Scheme Proficiency Exam

The Scheme Proficiency Exam for Fall, 2007 will be given on Tuesday, September 4, 2007. There will be two sittings, at 2:00pm and 2:45pm. Each student will be assigned to a seating; be sure to go to the seating to which you have been assigned. (If you have not been assigned to a seating, contact Bryan Lackaye ).

If you have been assigned Lisp/Scheme as a deficiency in your admission letter, then you must take this exam before taking G111 (MS students) or G711 (PhD students). If you are required to take this exam and you do not pass it, then you will not be allowed to register for G111.

The Scheme proficiency exam will measure your capability to program in Scheme at the level of the first problem set (or the Little Schemer). The exam will be 30 minutes in length. The questions on the test will be comparable to those found in Section 1.2.4 of Essentials of Programming Languages (2nd edition) (PDF). Note that this is a pencil-and-paper exam (no computers!).

To prepare yourself for this exam, I recommend The Little Schemer by Friedman and Felleisen, at least chapters 1-8. Another good book is The Scheme Programming Language, by Dybvig. You may also wish to study the book How to Design Programs, by Felleisen et al. You should definitely try to run your programs in Scheme, not just read about them; a number of implementations of Scheme are available for download; probably the most popular is PLT Scheme.