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Fall 2007 Scheme Proficiency Exam will be held on Tuesday, September 4, 2007. Time and place will be announced later.

If you have been assigned Lisp/Scheme as a deficiency in your admission letter, then you must take this exam before taking G111 (MS students) or G711 (PhD students). If you are required to take this exam and you do not pass it, then you will not be allowed to register for G111 in Fall, 2007.

The Scheme proficiency exam will measure your capability to program in Scheme at the level of the first problem set (or the Little Schemer). The exam will be 30 minutes in length. The questions on the test will be comparable to those found in Section 1.2.4 of Essentials of Programming Languages (2nd edition)(PDF). Note that this is a pencil-and-paper exam (no computers!).

To prepare yourself for this exam, I recommend The Little Schemer by Friedman and Felleisen, at least chapters 1-8. Another good book is The Scheme Programming Language, by Dybvig. You may also wish to study the book How to Design Programs, by Felleisen et al. You should definitely try to run your programs in Scheme, not just read about them; a number of implementations of Scheme are available for download; probably the most popular is PLT Scheme.

You do not need to register in advance for the exam. However, it would be helpful if you notified Diane Keys (diane@ccs.neu.edu ) in advance so that we can be sure to have the enough copies of the exam, etc.

Further details can be found at http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/scheme-exam. If you have questions about whether or not you must take the exam, please contact the CCIS Graduate School office Diane Keys (diane@ccs.neu.edu) .

Further notes:  If you can do the sample questions on the web page, you will be in good shape. In principle, the Little Lisper should prepare you to do this, but the other books will likely be helpful. If you are looking for a copy of the Little Schemer, you might want to try either the BU Bookstore in Kenmore Square or the MIT Coop, in Kendall Square. Or of course there's Amazon.