HW Exam
Contents
- HW Exam Overview
- Exam Logistics
- Honor Code
- Topics
- Reference Materials
- Study Materials
- Problem retakes (optional)
HW Exam Overview
- The exam timeline is marked on the calendar:
- info: Monday 6 October
- inclass: Thursday 16 October
- The exam is a paper exam covering topics listed below.
- Some study suggestions are included below.
Exam Logistics
The exam will be in person during class time.
You may bring a provided paper blue book that you can fill with your own notes to the exam (you may not bring textbooks or electronic material). Blue books will be available the week before the exam in class or picked up from Alexa’s office (W116).
If you have an ADR accommodation, Alexa will reach out to schedule extra time the week before the exam.
Honor Code
The exam is subject to the Honor Code.
You may not give or receive help on the exam. You may not share details of the exam questions or what material is covered until exam grades have been released to everyone in the course. At that point, you can discuss the exam with other current CS240 students (you should not provide this information to any future CS240 students).
You may not discuss the exam with past or future CS240 students.
You are encouraged to study with other students and can prepare your own paper notes with other students.
Topics
The exam does not focus on memorization and will include specific required information for certain sections (e.g., you do not need to memorize the exact set of instructions provided by the HW ISA). However, you should know offhand, for example, how to draw and use a 2-to-1 multiplexer, how to write a binary number in hex, or how to construct the truth table for XOR.
- The exam focuses on topics under the
Computational Building Blocks
part of the course.
- +Optional topics are excluded.
- Later topics, starting with Programming with Memory, are excluded.
- The exam assumes familiarity with the concepts used by associated assignments: Zero, Gates, Bits, and Arch.
Reference Materials
In addition to the per-question reference material, the following reference pages will be provided: HW reference page
Study Materials
The following materials may be of use in studying for the exam:
- Problems we’ll go over in class 10/6
-
Solutions will be posted after class 10/6
- Lecture slides, videos, and associated exercises
- Lab exercises
- Assignments
- The chapters we have used in the DDCA and CSAPP books include many good problems. Inventing problems by making small changes to homework/lab problems is also useful.
Here are some relevant problems from the two textbooks to look over. We suggest you pick and choose from these problems, rather than trying to do them all. We’ll go over some similar problems in class.
- CSAPP
- Practice problems with solution in book: 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.5, 2.8, 2.9, 2.12, 2.13, 2.14, 2.15, 2.16, 2.22, 2.23, 2.32, 2.44
- Exercises: 2.61, 2.64, 2.65, 2.66, 2.69, 2.73, 2.82,
- DDCA
- Exercises: 1.7, 1.8, 1.9a, 1.9b, 1.11, 1.13, 1.15, 1.17, 1.19, 1.26, 1.27, 1.33, 1.34, 1.35, 1.38, 1.48, 1.50, 1.51, 2.1, 2.3, 2.7, 2.16, 2.22, 2.25, 2.29
- Inventing your own problems by making small changes to homework/lab problems is also useful.
Problem retakes (optional)
On some exam problems, your Gradescope grade after the exam will indicate that you may retake a similar problem to earn additional credit. If you choose to retake the problem, the higher of your two problem scores will contribute to your exam score.
For Exam 1: HW, problem retakes will be available during the last hour of your scheduled lab section on Wednesday, October 29.