MT2 Info

Spring 2026 Canary: The following information HAS NOW been updated for Spring 2026!

Overview and Process

The test will be IN PERSON

• Time/Date: 7pm-8:40pm Feb 26th
  • The test will be set for 1 hour, 30 minutes
  • If you have USC approved accommodations, you must upload your accomodation information HERE 7 days before the exam, otherwise you will not be able to use your accommodations.

• Location: THH 101 & 102

  • If you have OSAS accommodations you should schedule your exam at the OSAS offices on Thursday during OSAS hours
• The test will be taken on paper. Be prepared a pencil/pen.
• The exam is Closed book, Closed notes, Closed Internet (search/reference). You may use your mind, and blank scratch paper but nothing else. No referencing your labs, homeworks, etc.

Topics and Style

The exam is a mix of short answer, multiple choice, analysis, tracing, and coding. We will visually grade your code and be fairly lenient with small syntax errors (e.g. a missing semicolon).

Unit 7 - Queues and Stack

• Implementation options and their efficiency
• ArrayBased list implementations (resizing and its runtime)
• Queue, stack and deque implementations
• Applications of queues and stacks

Unit 8 - Templates

• Process for defining templated classes
• Basic rules for templates and inheritance
• Functors

Unit 9 - PQ and Heaps

• Tree representations and storage
• Full, complete, and balanced tree definitions
• Implementation of a priority queue
• Heap implementation and operations (push, pop, top) and runtime
• build-heap (make-heap) algorithm and runtime
• heap-sort

Unit 10 - Graph Representations and Traversals

• Graph Algorithms

Unit 11 - Recursive Graph & Tree Traversals Algorithms

• Graph Traversals

Unit 12 - Recursion: Combinations & Backtracking

• Recursion
• Combinations & Backtracking

Unit 13 - Iterators

• Iterators

Unit 14 - Binary Search Trees & AVL Trees

• Binary Search Trees
• Balanced Binary Search Trees / AVL Trees

Unit 15 - Splay Trees

• Splay Trees

Practice Materials

Sample Midterms

• Sample Midterm - Solutions
  • Copy construction, operator overloading are not a major focus of CS104 but were in previous years.
• Sample Midterm 2 (partial solutions)
  • Q1 Solution
  • Q2 and Q3 Solution
• Summer 2020 Midterm (Programming) (no solutions)
• Summer 2021 Midterm (Hybrid)
  • Skeleton Code
  • Solutions

Practice Quizzes

• ADTs - Solutions
• Streams and Simple Recursion - Solutions
• Runtime and Recursion - [No Solutions]
• Linked Lists and Recursion - Solutions

• Build-heap - Solutions

• Sample Midterm Heap Problems - Solutions
• Sample Midterm 2 (partial solutions)
  • Q1 Solution
  • Q2 and Q3 Solution
• Summer 2021 Midterm (Hybrid)
  • Skeleton Code
  • Solutions
• Lazy-Quicksort - Solutions

Practice Quizzes

• Runtime and Recursion - [No Solutions]
• Linked Lists and Recursion - Solutions
• Build-heap - Solutions