Sports & Pop Culture
This American singer is known for hits such as Bad Romance, Born This Way, and Poker Face.
Lady Gaga
What is USC’s official mascot, often seen galloping at football games?
Traveler
This Python data structure is ordered, allows duplicate elements, and can store multiple values of different data types
List
What is the mean of the numbers 12, 18, 24, and 30? (NO CALCULATOR)
21
In machine learning, the data used to teach a model patterns and relationships is called what?
Training data
This former USC running back was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985 and had a highly publicized legal case in the 1990s.
O.J. Simpson
These are USC's official school colors.
Cardinal and gold
This term is used to describe the process of finding and fixing problems in your algorithm or program.
Debug
In statistics, what is the term for a data point that falls below the lower bound of a boxplot?
An outlier
In a machine learning model, the input variables are called what?
Features
During a July 2025 Coldplay concert, the Jumbotron showed a "couple" together, who were later identified as the CEO and HR executive of this company.
Astronomer
Which USC coach transformed the football team into national contenders in the 2000s?
Pete Carroll
A programmer is creating an application that needs to store a value indicating if the user is logged in or not. What is the best data type to use?
Boolean
In data science, what does "NaN" stand for when representing missing or undefined values in a dataset?
Not a Number
This type of machine learning uses labeled data - meaning we already know the correct answers.
Supervised learning
This USC dorm was featured in The Office in a scene where Pam went to art school
Pardee Tower
This building, home to many data science and computer science classes, is known by the acronym SAL.
Salvatori Computer Science Center
This Python function returns a string with leading and trailing white spaces removed.
.strip()
This command in SQL is used to combine rows from two or more tables based on a related column between them
JOIN
You’re given a dataset of students with their hours studied and test scores, and you want to predict a student’s score based on how many hours they study.
What type of machine learning algorithm should you use?
Linear regression
This USC alumna is the most decorated female track and field athlete in Olympic history, with a total of 11 Olympic medals, including 7 golds.
Allyson Felix
How many fountains do we have on campus (±2)?
38
What programming language was used to create Twitter?
Ruby
Shows correlation between variables as colors in a matrix
In machine learning, this common problem occurs when a model performs well on training data but poorly on unseen data.
What is overfitting?