Internet Engineering Exams

Introduction

The course is assessed twice, and the two are not the same kind of thing:

• the midterm is a take-home project — students get about a week to build a small frontend or backend application;
• the final is a real exam — questions answered in a room, in a fixed time.

The repository keeps both, and the split runs all the way through it:

src/questions/<name>/main.tex   a question — the bank the finals draw on
src/projects/<name>/main.tex    a take-home project
exams/<name>.tex                a final: which questions, in which order
midterms/<name>.tex             a midterm: which project, and the deadline
ie-exam.cls                     the shared class

The first exam was a quiz at Beheshti University, Fall 2020, when everything was remote.

How to build?

The exams are built with TeX Live (XeLaTeX, driven by latexmk) and Pygments, which minted shells out to for code listings.

TeX Live 2023 or newer is required. The class asks xepersian for its Persian command aliases with the localize option, which was spelled localise up to TeX Live 2022.

Platform	Install
macOS	brew install --cask mactex-no-gui (or MacTeX)
Debian/Ubuntu	apt install texlive-full latexmk python3-pygments
Arch	pacman -S texlive texlive-langarabic texlive-latexextra python-pygments
Any	install-tl with scheme-full

make            # every final and midterm -> build/<name>.pdf
make answers    # the same, with the answer keys and grading notes shown
make list       # the finals and the midterms
make questions  # the question bank and the projects
make clean      # remove build artefacts

make build/swapi.pdf builds a single sheet, whichever kind it is.

Or, without installing a TeX distribution — this is also what CI runs:

docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/work -w /work texlive/texlive:latest make

Answers

Answers and grading notes live next to their question inside a پاسخ environment. They are hidden in a normal build and only appear in make answers, so the same source produces both the exam sheet and the answer key.

Because of that, this repository holds answer keys: keep that in mind before sharing a link to it with students.

Writing a question

See CONTRIBUTING.md. The short version — create src/questions/<name>/main.tex:

\قسمت{یک عنوان خوب}

صورت پرسش ...

\نمره{۲}

\begin{پاسخ}
پاسخ و نکات تصحیح ...
\end{پاسخ}

and add it to a final in exams/:

\ورودی{questions/<name>/main}

A take-home project is the same shape, in src/projects/<name>/main.tex, and gets a sheet in midterms/ that carries the deadline:

\جزئیات‌آزمون{
دانشگاه={دانشگاه صنعتی امیرکبیر},
نام={میان‌ترم (پروژه فرانت‌اند)},
مهلت={یک هفته}
}

exams/all-questions.tex includes every question in the bank; it exists so that CI fails when any question stops compiling, not only the ones the current exam happens to use. It is a check, not a sheet to hand out. The projects are covered the same way, by their own midterm sheets.

Midterms

Frontend. A very simple GUI (pure JS, CSS and HTML) for an API — easy, fun, and a good way to measure what students actually picked up. swapi, github and genderize are all this shape. Good sources for a new one:

• https://github.com/marcelscruz/public-apis
• https://publicapis.dev/

Backend. A very simple server in Go with a few APIs; students are free to use any library or framework that fits them. shopping-basket is this shape.

Because these run for about a week off-campus, an external API that rate-limits or goes down is a real risk — github uses the unauthenticated GitHub API, which allows 60 requests per hour per IP. Say in the handout what a student should do when the service is unreachable.