HW Exam

Contents

• HW Exam Overview
• Exam Logistics
• Honor Code
• Topics
• Reference Materials
• Study Materials
• Revisions

HW Exam Overview

• The exam timeline is marked on the calendar:
  • info: Thursday 15 February
  • inclass: Thursday 22 February
  • revisions: Thursday 14 March
• 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).

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 solutions 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). Do not discuss the specific exam questions 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 assignments associated with the exam topics.

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 from class 02/15 and 02/20.

• 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

Revisions

Exam revisions for Exam 1: HW are due on Thursday, March 14 via this Google form.

On any exam problem where you got 2+ points off, you can revise your answer to earn back credit up to the total number of points on the problem minus 2. Such problems are marked in your Gradescope feedback.

For each problem, the revision must include:

1. Your revised answer.
2. A phrase or 1-2 sentences reflecting on why you got your previous answer. For example, “I forgot that we were working with signed numbers” or “I mixed up number of bits and number of bytes” would be good reflections.

You should not discuss your revisions with any other students or the tutors, though you may discuss revisions with the two instructors. You can discuss the general concepts with other students and the tutors. You should not use any reference material outside of the CS240 website and textbook(s).

You are encouraged to use any resources on the CS240 website as you make your revisions and to discuss your revisions with the two instructors.