💪 Practice Problems

DSC 10 at UC San Diego


This site contains practice problems taken from old DSC 10 quizzes and exams. We’ve organized problems in a few ways:

  1. As discussions. Each discussion problem set contains problems about a particular topic. Come to discussions to work on these problem sets in groups, with the help of our course staff.
  2. As practice exams. Work through these in the weeks leading up to exams.
  3. As practice quizzes. Work through these to practice for quizzes.

In all cases, you should work on these problems on paper, since your quizzes and exams will also be on paper. Even though you will see some multiple choice bubbles, you intentionally cannot select them.


🧮 Pretest: Due September 29th

DSC 10’s only prerequisite is high school algebra. In order to gauge your preparedness for the type of math you’ll see in this class, you should work through these practice problems on your own. This pretest will help you identify any gaps in your background knowledge and it will teach you some useful test-taking skills.


💯 Discussions for Fall 2024

Week Date Topic(s)
1 Monday, September 30th Getting Started With Jupyter Notebooks
2 Monday, October 7th Arrays and DataFrames
3 Monday, October 14th Querying, Grouping, and Plotting
4 Monday, October 21st Functions, DataFrames, and Control Flow
5 Monday, October 28th Probability and Simulation
6 Monday, November 4th Sampling, Bootstrapping, and Confidence Intervals
7 Monday, November 11th The Normal Distribution and the CLT
8 Monday, November 18th Choosing Sample Sizes, Hypothesis Testing, and Permutation Testing

📝 Exams

Each exam linked here lists the conditions under which the exam was given, including the allotted amount of time and the resources allowed. For the best preparation, work through all the questions on an exam in order under these same conditions, writing down your answers on paper as you go, then check all your answers at the end. It is recommended that you prioritize the most recent exams first in your studying.

Quarter Instructor(s) Exam
Fall 2024 Janine Tiefenbruck Midterm
Summer 2024 Nishant Kheterpal Midterm
Spring 2024 Janine Tiefenbruck Midterm
Final
Winter 2024 Janine Tiefenbruck Midterm
Final
Fall 2023 Rod Albuyeh, Suraj Rampure, Janine Tiefenbruck Midterm
Final
Spring 2023 Suraj Rampure Midterm
Final
Winter 2023 Janine Tiefenbruck Midterm
Final
Fall 2022 Suraj Rampure, Puoya Tabaghi, Janine Tiefenbruck Midterm
Final
Summer 2022 Sam Lau Final
Spring 2022 Janine Tiefenbruck Midterm
Final
Winter 2022 Suraj Rampure Midterm
Final
Fall 2021 Suraj Rampure, Janine Tiefenbruck Midterm
Final
Winter 2021 Janine Tiefenbruck Midterm
Final

🙋‍♀️ Quizzes

Below, you’ll find an archive of past quizzes. Note that different quarters had a different number of quizzes, so the content of each quiz is not the same across quarters.

We’ve provided answers to all quiz questions, but you won’t find detailed explanations. For quizzes, you should try to figure out why the answers are what they are on your own, and come to us in office hours if you’re stuck. (Exam questions are harder, hence the detailed explanations.)

🆕 So you can see how your quizzes will look on paper, we’ve provided a PDF copy of Quiz 1 from Spring 2024, exactly as it was provided to students.

Quarter Instructor(s) Quiz
Fall 2024 Janine Tiefenbruck Quiz 1Quiz 2Quiz 3
Spring 2024 Janine Tiefenbruck Quiz 1Quiz 2Quiz 3Quiz 4Quiz 5
Winter 2024 Janine Tiefenbruck Quiz 1Quiz 2Quiz 3Quiz 4Quiz 5Quiz 6
Fall 2023 Rod Albuyeh, Suraj Rampure, Janine Tiefenbruck Quiz 1Quiz 2Quiz 3Quiz 4

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