Final Exam
Logistics
- Style and Delivery:
- The exam is structured like a paper exam, not a programming project.
- The exam will be delivered to you and submitted by you electronically. Specific logistics will be posted soon.
- Timeline/schedule:
- The exam is available from the first Reading Day of T3 (Wednesday 31 March) through the last Exam Day of T3 (Saturday 3 April). Within this time window, you may work on the exam whenever you want and for as long as you want, without supervision.
- The exam is designed to require “a couple hours, give or take,” for a prepared student.
Exam Download, Work, and Submission Instructions
The exam is distributed, collected, and graded with Gradescope. Check your Wellesley email for an invitation to the CS 240 Gradescope course. If you cannot access Gradescope, contact the instructor ASAP.
Take the following steps when you are ready to begin the exam.
Download the exam:
- Review the policy on Allowed Resources.
- In Gradescope, click the CS 240 course and find the Dashboard.
- Click the Final Exam assignment. It will show a prompt with a link to Download the Final Exam PDF (and access to upload your submission). Download the exam PDF.
Work on the exam:
- Option 1: Print the exam and write with pencil or pen on the printed copy. When you are done, use a scanner or a scanning app with a phone’s camera to scan your completed paper exam as a PDF. Please include all pages in the original order. This may take several minutes.
- Option 2: Mark the PDF directly using the software and device of your choice.
Submit the exam:
Once you have a PDF of your completed exam, log in to Gradescope, revisit the CS 240 Final Exam listing as before, upload your PDF to the CS 240 Final Exam assignment, and confirm that your answers appear as expected in the Gradescope view. (It is fine if your answers spill out of the Gradescope answer boxes, but they should be legible. You can upload as many times as needed before the deadline.) If you have issues, please contact the instructor ASAP.
Remember to mark your name, ID, and signature on the exam cover page before submitting your exam. Unsigned exams will not be graded.
Allowed Resources
The exam is subject to the Honor Code, with the following policies for allowed resources:
- Human resources:
- Exam work is strictly individual.
- You may ask Ben clarifying questions about the exam via private messages.
- You may not post messages in shared streams in Zulip.
- You may not communicate about the exam with anyone except Ben.
- You may not give or receive help on the exam, share the exam itself, or share solutions.
- Reference resources:
- The exam allows use of all materials included in the CS 240 website (any URL that starts with https://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs240/s21/), as well as the electronic textbooks and videos linked from the topics page or lab page.
- The exam allows use of your own course notes prepared ahead of the exam.
- No other resources are allowed. For example, you may not consult outside web resources such as a web search, StackOverflow, or materials for other courses.
- Computational resources:
- You may use a computer to access, print, scan, and submit the exam, and optionally to type/draw solutions.
- All other computational resources are prohibited for exam work:
- You may not run compilers, interpreters, or debuggers to assist with the exam.
- You may not use a calculator or number converters to assist with the exam.
Topics
- Included topics:
- Relevant assignments: The exam will not ask you to recall specific parts of assignment solutions, but it may assume familiarity with the concepts used.
- All other topics are excluded from the exam, including lab-only topics, optional topics, and topics after malloc: Digital Logic; Combinational Logic; Arithmetic Logic; Sequential Logic; A Simple Processor; +Floating Point Number Representation; Memory Hierarchy, Cache; Exceptional Control Flow; Process Model; +Shells, Signals; Virtual Memory; Compilers, Runtime Systems; Beyond 240; and any other topics incidentally covered during class or lab that did not appear in the schedule or included topics.
Study Materials
The following materials may be of use in studying for the exam:
- Review materials and Midterm/Final exams from a similar course at
University of Washington in Autumn 2016 or
later:
- These sample exams follow a similar style to the CS 240 exam. Sample solutions are available.
- It is sometimes necessary to pick and choose problems.
- The topics relevant for CS 240 are split across the Midterm and Final exams in this other course.
- These exams may also cover some topics, such as floating point numbers, caching, processes, or virtual memory, that will not be covered by the CS 240 exam under the term system.
- Avoid the exams prior to Autumn 2016, which use an older version of x86 that will confuse you.
- An incomplete list of suggested problems:
- Winter 2019:
- Midterm: 1a, 1b, 2, 3, 4
- Final: 1, 2, 3, 4
- Autumn 2018:
- Midterm: 1A, 1B, 1C, 2, 3, 4, 5
- Final: M1A, M1B, M1C, M2, M3, M4, M5, F6
- Winter 2019:
- The chapters we have used in the CSAPP book include many excellent practice problems (with solutions at the end of the chapter) and homework problems.
- In-class exercises
- Lab exercises
- Assignments