Test

The point of the test is to ensure you were doing the following throughout the course:

• Paying attention

• Completing the assignments yourself (versus copying-and-pasting from generative AI, etc.)

If both of those are the case, you will likely do well on the test without a huge amount of studying. This test is meant to evaluate understanding, not syntax or terminology.

Format¶

• The test will contain:

  • Fill-in-the-blank

  • Matching

  • Free response questions

    • Coding

      • The syntax isn’t expected to be perfect.

    • High-level

• It will be done on paper.

• It will be “closed book”, meaning no:

  • Cheat sheets

  • Phones

  • Laptops

  • etc.

Topics¶

The following is in scope for the test:

• Working with data using only the Python standard library (“pure Python”)

• Python/pandas data types/structures

• Jupyter concepts

• Markdown basics

• Data manipulation

  • Boolean indexing

  • Aggregation (count/sum/mean)

  • Grouping

  • Cleaning

  • Merging

• Troubleshooting

• Data visualization

  • Choosing chart types

  • Chart hygiene

• Time series

  • Resampling

• APIs, conceptually

Example questions¶

Recommendation: Treat this as a practice test. Try completing them without using a search engine, generative AI, the course materials, etc.

• What types can a pandas column be? Come up with at least three.

• What are some scenarios where you’d need to deal with types in pandas? Come up with at least three.

• ~~How do you make a link in Markdown?~~ What is Markdown useful for? What are specific things you can do with it?

• How does groupby() work?

• What is resampling used for? Include an example.

• What’s a kernel, in the context of this course?

• Write the equivalent of the following in pandas.

  import csv
  
  lowest_gdp = None
  lowest_country = None
  
  with open("gdp.csv") as f:
     reader = csv.DictReader(f)
     for row in reader:
        gdp = float(row["GDP"])
        if lowest_gdp is None or gdp < lowest_gdp:
              lowest_gdp = gdp
              lowest_country = row["Country"]
  
  print(lowest_country)

• What’s a choropleth map? Try explaining to someone who’s never seen one before.

• What are the different kinds of merges? Can describe through text and/or visuals.

• How would you merge the following Dataframes? Write the code as best you can.

  intros

  Name	Year introduced
  Mickey Mouse	1928
  Big Bird	1969
  Lisa Simpson	1987

  shows

  First	Last	Series
  Lisa	Simpson	The Simpsons
  Mickey	Mouse	multiple
  Big	Bird	Sesame Street

• Why would you use an API?

• Suppose you have this JSON stored in a candidates variable. Write code to retrieve the name.

  {
    "results": [{ "name": "Jimmy McMillan", "first_file_date": "2010-01-01" }]
  }