CE156 COURSEWORK AUTUMN 2022
ntroduction
You should refer to the Postgraduate Students’ Handbook for details of the University
policy regarding late submission and plagiarism; the work handed in must be entirely
your own.
The assignment comprises five exercises. You should submit to FASER a single zip file
containing (i) one .py file for each exercise and (ii) the output file produced by exercise
5.
Marking Criteria
Characteristics of an excellent project (70% or more):
Excellent code documentation (i.e. descriptions using the “#” in your Python scripts and
documentation strings for all functions)
Excellent use of Python’s native methods, code standards, standard data structures and NumPy
and/or Pandas dataframes where needed
Excellent use of relevant data types
Follows carefully the specification provided (where applicable)
Excellent code optimisation in terms of result/outcome production and readability
Generally, an excellent solution, carefully worked out, producing and demonstrating clearly and
correctly results/outcomes
Characteristics of a good project (60%):
Good code documentation
Good use of Python’s code standards, standard data structures and NumPy and/or Pandas
dataframes where needed
Good use of relevant data types
Follows the specification provided (where applicable)
Good code optimisation in terms of result/outcome production and readability
Generally, a good solution which produces and demonstrates correct results/outcomes
Characteristics of a fair project (50% or less):
No meaningful code documentation
Code tends to be lengthier and more verbose than needed, or at times difficult to read
No real thought on the relevance of data types
Does not follow the specification provided (results/outcomes are produced without addressing the
question).
A solution that only seems to deliver part of the results without showing some logical code
developments
If you submit solutions to only some of the exercises the mark awarded will be
proportional to the percentage of the assignment that has been submitted
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Exercise 1 (10%)
Write a program that asks the user to input his/her date of birth in the format dd/mm/yyyy.
If the input is not in the correct format or the date is invalid the program should output an
appropriate error message. If the input is a valid date the program should calculate and
output the user’s age. (You will need to check whether the user has had a birthday this
year e.g. someone born on 01/11/2000 will be 21 on 16 December 2021, but someone
born on 25/12/2000 will still be 20.) The program should additionally output a “Happy
birthday” message if it is the user’s birthday today.
To calculate the age you will need to obtain today’s date; to do this you need to use the
line
from datetime import date
and then use date.today() to obtain a date object containing today’s date. Yo can
access the day, month and year of a date d using d.day, d.month and d.year (these are
all integer values).
Exercise 2 (15%)
Write a function that returns a list of the prime numbers between two positive integers
supplied as arguments. Use this is in a program that asks the user to supply two positive
integers, checks that the input is valid, then calls the function and outputs the numbers in
the returned list, with 10 numbers per output line.
If the user enters negative numbers or supplies non-numeric input the program should
output an appropriate error message; the two numbers should be accepted in either order.
The range should be inclusive; if the user inputs 103 and 1009 (or 1009 and 103) these
two numbers (which are both prime) should be included in the output.
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Exercise 3 (30%)
The three functions for this exercise should be written in a a single .py file. You should
not submit any code that calls the functions, although it is strongly recommended that you
do produce such code in order to test your functions
a) Write a function that takes a string as a parameter and returns True if and only if
the string is a palindrome
b) Write a function that takes a string as a parameter, converts the string to lower-case
and returns the third most frequent letter. (If there are equally frequent letters you
may return any one of the third most frequent letters.) Non-letters should be
ignored.
c) Write a function that takes a string as a parameter, counts the number of upper-
case-letters, lower-case letters and digits in the string and returns a tuple containing
the three counts.
Exercise 4 (20%)
Write a function that takes 2 arguments, a list of tuples and a string containing the name
of a department. Each tuple in the list will contain the name, department and registration
number of a student. The function should output the names and registration numbers of
all students in the list whose department matches the string argument. The output should
be displayed one student per line, sorted by registration number, in a neatly formatted
table. If there are no matches an appropriate message should be output.
Write a program that asks the user to supply a file name and attempts to open the file.
Each line of the file should contain the name, registration number and department of a
student, separated by commas. A typical line may be
Mike Sanderson,2111111,CSEE
The program should convert the contents of each line into a tuple with 3 elements and
add them to a list. (You may assume that the contents of the file are in the correct format
so there is no need to perform validation). If the file cannot be opened the program should
output an appropriate message and terminate.
After the input of the file contents has been completed the program should output the list
of tuples (no formatting required) then enter a loop in which the user is asked to supply
the name of a department. The user input and list of tuples should be passed to a call to
the function described above. After returning from the function the user should be asked
if he/she wishes to quit or to supply the name of another department.
Hint: the elements of the tuple do not have to be stored in the order described above. A
different order may make the sorting easier.
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Exercise 5 (25%)
The aim of this exercise is to process a file containing marks for a university module. The
input file will have the format
5 3 30
1991111 65.5 45.5 47 29.5
2031234 75.5 68 49 51.5
2012345 33 50 48.5 50.5
2019734 55.5 51.5 72 61
2187345 39 47.5 51 38
The first line of the file contains the number of students, the number of pieces of
coursework and the percentage coursework weighting, e.g. the 30 in this example denotes
that the coursework comprises 30% of the overall module mark (with the exam making
up the other 70%). It is assumed that each piece of coursework has the same weighting
so that the overall coursework mark can be calculated as the average of the individual
marks.
Each subsequent line contains a registration number, an exam mark and a set of
coursework marks. (The number of coursework marks will be consistent with the number
on the first line). The number of such lines will match the number of students.
Write a program that will open such a file, read the first line and create a 2-dimensional
NumPy array where number of rows is the number of students and each row has 4
elements. (Initialise this array using a call to the array function with an argument
[[0,0,0,0]]*n, where n is the number of students.)
The program should then read the remaining lines line-by-line and use the input values to
store in a row of the array the registration number, the exam mark, the average coursework
mark and the overall mark (calculated using the exam mark, the average coursework mark
and the weighting). You may assume that all lines will contain the correct number of
marks and the number of students will match the number specified on the first line.
Having generated the array, the program should then create another 1-dimensional array
with n elements, but with a structured date type with 4 integers and one string as the
components). (Use a list containing multiple copies of a structure with default values (e.g.
zeroes and an empty string) as the argument to array.)
From the data in each row of the first array the program should generate a structure
containing the student’s registration number, exam mark, coursework mark and total
mark, all rounded to the nearest integer, and a grade string to be calculated using the rules
below and store this in the corresponding element in the second array. (You can round a
real number n to the nearest integer using round(n).)
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The program should then produce a version of the second array sorted by overall mark
and output this array to a file (using a single call to the print function of the form
print(array2, file=f)).
It should finally output to the screen/console the number of students who have first,
second and third-class marks, the number of students who have failed and the registration
numbers of the students who have first-class marks.
You should submit to FASER the program file, and also the output file that your program
produced from an input file that will be provided on Moodle by Tuesday of week 10.
Rules for calculating grades
Any student with a rounded mark of less than 30 for either the coursework average or the exam has
failed, irrespective of the overall module mark. For all other students a rounded overall mark of 70 or
more has a first-class grade, a rounded mark between 50 and 69 (inclusive) has a second-class grade, a
rounded mark between 40 and 49 has a third-class grade, and a rounded mark below 40 fails.