Exam 1 (HW) Overview

Exam Logistics

This exam is a 3-hour proctored pencil-and paper exam held during the range 4-10pm on one of Mon/Tue/Wed Oct 19/20/21 starting at at time that you have indicated in this Exam 1 scheduling form. (If you previously chose a time that you wish to change, just fill out the form again with the new time you prefer.)

Here are the rooms reserved for Exam 1:

  • Mon Oct 19: SCI H105

  • Tue Oct 20: SCI N207

  • Wed Oct 21: SCI N207

Students with accomodations and other issues might take the exam in a different room or have more time.

The exam is 3-hour pencil-and paper exam, subject to these guidelines:

  • No computers or other electronic devices may be used during the exam

  • The exam is open book in the sense that you may bring the following:

    • Printed materials from the course website

    • Your own handwritten notes

    You must not bring any other printed materials nor any notes written by any other person. Lyn might ask to examine the notes that you have brought to the exam.

  • You will be given a blue book for writing down scratch work during your exam. These blue books will be collected at the end of the exam.

  • Lyn will be proctoring the exam and will be in (or just outside of) the exam room during most of the exam time. Feel free to ask him clarification questions about the exam.

  • If you wish to take a brief break to go to the bathroom or have a snack outside the testing room, you may do so. No eating is allowed in the exam room so as not to disturb other students. However, you must not take any electronic device with you if you leave the room.

Honor Code

The exam is subject to the Honor Code.

  • You must not give or receive help on the exam. You may not share details of the exam questions or what material is covered until exam and exam retake grades have been released to everyone in the course. At that point, you can discuss the exam with other current CS240 students.

  • You must never discuss the exam with past or future CS240 students.

  • You may only use publicly available study materials.

  • You are encouraged to study with other students and can prepare your own paper notes with other students.

Contents

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 not covered in Exam 1. In particular, none of the material related to the Pointers assignment will be covered on Exam 1.
  • The exam assumes familiarity with the concepts used by assignments associated with the exam topics.
  • The exam assumes familiarity with the concepts used by associated assignments:
    • Zero
    • Gates
    • Bits
    • Arch

Reference Materials

In addition to the per-question reference material, the following reference pages will be provided: Exam 1 (HW) reference page

Study Materials

The following materials may be of use in studying for the exam:

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.

http://127.0.0.1:4000/~cs240/f26/about/#ai-policy

Problem retakes (optional)

On some exam problems, your Gradescope grade after the exam might indicate that you may retake a similar problem to earn additional credit, possibly capped by a certain point limit. If you choose to retake the problem, the higher of your two problem scores will contribute to your exam score.

More details on retakes will be posted here at a later date.