<p>No, most professors give out past exams, Soria doesn’t. All you have to do is scan every exam you have. Particularly, when you want to review for a final by perhaps retrying the more difficult problems on exams, you can simply scan your exam, and then airbrush the markings off, and create a pdf or print them. That way, you can practice on weakpoints w/o much guidance (looking at your exams w/the markings and saying “I get it now” is usually not sufficient). And then of course we distribute them (if one asks for it) because in reality they differ so drastically from year to year that exposure to prior exams doesn’t help as much in Soria’s class as it does in other sections. He may rehash some of the same concepts, but put them in a completely different context or a completely different exam. If anything, they only help you guess how hard the exam will be relative to the exam prior to it, so it’s particularly useful after the first exam to get a hold of one, because it’s possible that the 2nd exam will be the first where he exposes you to a different/harder format. The past two years, it’s been a partial exposure (maybe a couple of hard problems toward the end), but my year, he went completely hardcore, and the whole 2nd exam was quite difficult. The 3rd and 4th exam (with 4th being extremely difficult) are still traditionally more difficult, and having back exams for those really don’t help that much because they vary the most annually in terms of content and problem types.</p>
<p>If you take Soria’s class, you’ll have mentors (to help w/the problem sets that you generally start getting before the 3rd exam) that are probably generous enough to let you borrow one. However, when you actually use these, don’t put too much weight on them. Mainly put weight on notes (by the 3rd exam, pay particular attention to any special/application topics covered in class. Curveball questions tend to kind of resemble such concepts), group session problems, quizzes, and any supplementary material given in class (you never know).</p>