Welcome!

Welcome to Caltech! We’re so excited to meet you this coming Fall! This website houses the CS Placement Exam which will help us assess your current level of programming knowledge and allow us to place you into the correct CS course!

Important Dates

• Release Date: Tuesday, July 30th @ 9:00 a.m. PDT
• Due Date: Sunday, August 11th @ 9:00 a.m. PDT

Should I take the Placement Exam?

If you learned Java in high school, the short answer is yes! There are multiple possible outcomes of this exam:

• You could be placed into CS 1 (meaning we believe you would benefit from the material taught in the course).
• You could be placed into CS 1x (meaning we believe you have a very solid background for programming in Java, but there are some fundamental gaps in knowledge we’d like you to work on before taking CS 2).
• You could get course credit for CS 1 (meaning that we believe you should skip directly to CS 2).

What should I watch out for when taking the Placement Exam?

The following items will automatically cause you to fail the placement exam (regardless of what else you did):

• Compilations warnings or errors of any kind
• Not passing all the tests provided
• Having magic numbers in your code (i.e., numbers in your code that should be final constant variables)
• “Code golfing” (i.e., the code is written in an overly succinct way that sacrifices readability for shorter length)
• Poor usage of booleans (i.e., instead of returning a boolean directly, the code checks its value and returns true or false instead)
• Commented out (or otherwise “dead”) code
• Debug or extraneous print statements

Collaboration, Google, and Usage of AI

You may not discuss the placement test or your code with anyone, share code with any living being, copy any code from the internet, or use any form of AI to generate any part of your code. If we are reasonably sure you used AI or your code is sufficiently similar to another student’s code, we will not hesitate to send your placement test to the BoC. Please please don’t start your Caltech career off by cheating.

Taking the Placement Exam

The placement exam is closed for this year!

How can I appeal the Placement Exam grading?

You can’t. All decisions about placement are final. If you want to make sure that you’re ready for the types of things you will be graded on, we recommend you take CS 0a!

Questions?

Please send any questions to csplacement@caltech.edu!