Comprehensive Examinations Archive

Prior to Autumn 2005, the Computer Science Department distributed the last three years worth of comprehensive examinations on paper as a study aid. From now on, this information will be distributed online.

I have tried to provide useful groupings for downloading. For example, in addition to providing the individual files for downloading, I provide several aggregations:

• A single PDF file per year for easy printing
• A single zip file per year for easy downloading
• A single zip file per area for focusing on a particular subject

In many cases, no solutions were provided. If your study group creates a solution, I will post what I receive.

Most content from before 2005 was scanned by Brian Carlstrom on an HP OfficeJet 7410 with an automatic feeder and fed through Adobe Acrobat 6.0 OCR which also performed DPI reduction post-OCR to reduce file sizes. The OCR worked reasonably well to allow keyword searches accross PDF files. We tried to manual verify each scan to make sure there were no missing pages, but please let us know if you find any problems. We have also archvied the large original pre-DPI reduction files if there are serious problems with readability let us know. Going forward we hope to directly post electronic versions of the files directly without scanning.

When multiple versions of a file are available, by default the aggregations and links prefer original PDF files, original Microsoft Word DOC files, and scanned PDF files in that order. If you want to see if an alternative format exists, you can browse the directories by year.

Good luck with comps!

Historical curiosities:

• STAN-CS-TR-78-677: Computer Science Comprehensive Exams: 1974-1978
• STAN-CS-TR-81-869: Computer Science Comprehensive Exams: 1978/79 - 1980/81

By Year

By Area

Individual Files

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

1989