CSS Graduate Certificate in Software Design and Development (GCSDD)

Student Self-Assessment Toolkit

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Graduate Certificate Prerequisite Self-Assessment

Thank you for your interest in our Graduate Certificate in Software Design and Development (GCSDD). The GCSDD course content moves very quickly, and teaches advanced OOP concepts at a graduate level using C++. You will need to be competent and comfortable with the material covered in the programming admission prerequisites (CSS 161 & CSS 162) to be a successful student in the GCSDD.

With this in mind, our faculty leadership has compiled these two self-assessments for the GCSDD prerequisite courses CSS 161 and CSS 162 to help you gauge your programming knowledge.

Directions for each assessment are listed clearly at the top of the PDF documents; answer keys will NOT be provided. Applicants to the GCSDD who have not taken formal programming courses (i.e., credited equivalent college courses) are required to include the source code listings to their solutions in their application materials. See http://www.uwb.edu/mscss/gcsdd/applying-for-gcsdd (step 3 and 4) for further details.

Necessary files for the assessments can be downloaded here:

• CSS161-SelfAssessment.pdf
• CSS162-SelfAssessment.pdf
• CSS162-Driver.zip

Please note that you will need to extract the source code files from the zip file.

If you have not taken formal programming courses and would like to apply to the GCSDD, please submit the source code to your solutions to the above self-assessments by following these steps:

1. Create a zip file containing all the source code to your solutions
2. Upload this zip file to a sharable cloud storage (e.g., Microsoft OneDrive, Google drive, or DropBox).
3. Follow this link, fill and submit the form. Please make sure to include the proper URL to your zip file, and that the access right is configured properly.

We will download your zipped source code file and review your solution when processing your application.

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Graduate Certificate Curriculum Self-Assessment

Once you are finished with the 161/162 self-assessments, we encourage you to take a closer look at the Graduate Certificate curriculum. The simplest way to confirm if the certificate is a good fit for your educational goals is to examine the course content. Our faculty has selected a set of sample assignments, labs, and quizzes from our courses in the Graduate Certificate, with the intent of giving prospective students a feel for exactly what the course content entails - and where their skill level matches.

The following are for students to assess their own abilities and level of preparedness for the certificate classes. These are examples of assignments given later in the quarter and they showcase the expected student learning outcomes for each of the corresponding classes.

Software and Systems Development Courses

• CSS501: Data Structures and Object-Oriented Programming 1
  • Assignment 4: Here is the assignment specification. Here are sample input files: 100.txt, 1000.txt, 10000.txt, 100000.txt.
  • Assignment 5: Here is the assignment specification. (This is a typical example of the last assignment in this class.) Here are sample input files: prog5-test-input1.txt, prog5-test-input2.txt, prog5-test-input3.txt, and the correct output: prog5-correct-output.txt.
  • Here is a sample grading rubric for programming assignments in this class.
     
• CSS502: Data Structures and Object-Oriented Programming 2
  • Assignment 2 part-1: Here is the assignment specification.
  • Assignment 3: Here is the assignment specification. Here is a rubric that can serve to guide the design portion of this assignment.
  • Here is a sample grading rubric for programming assignments in this class.
     
• CSS503: Systems Programming
  • Assignment 2: Here is the assignment specification. Included here is relevant source code to help students with their implementation.
  • Assignment 4: The assignment specification is here, as is the supporting relevant source code to help students with their implementation.

 

Courses on Software Engineering, Design, and Test

Here is a brief, high-level overview of the expected knowledge students will gain from the following series of classes.

• CSS506: Software Development Processes
  • Class project example, which is described in the overview here. Additional documentation includes a feasibility analysis,   requirements, and finally instructions to follow for submission.
  • Also included here are sample quizzes: Quiz1 and Quiz2
    
    
• CSS507: Software Modeling Techniques
  • Assignment 4: Here is the specification.
  • Assignment 5: Here is the specification.
  • Final case study: Here is the assignment specification.
  • Also included here is a sample self-assessment examination and corresponding answer key.
     
• CSS508: Software Testing and Quality
  • Here is a sample self-assessment examination and corresponding answer key.