Contents

HW Exam Overview

Exam Logistics

The exam is a 2.5-hour proctored pencil-and paper exam that for most students will be held in room SCI N207 in the time period 4-10pm on Tue Mar 4, Wed Mar 5, and Thu Mar 6. Students with accomodations and other issues might take the exam in a different room or have more time. Lyn will communicate via email with all students to confirm their exam plans.

The exam is open book in the sense that you may bring any hardcopy materials (books, printed slides, handwritten notes).

  • You cannot bring any notes written by any other person.

  • You cannot use any electronic device during 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.

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.
  • 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

Here are some Midterm 1 Review problems that cover some of the topics covered by the exam.

A collection of exam study problems will be posted by the morning of Sun Mar 2.

Additionally, 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

Revisions

On some exam problems, your Gradescope grade after the exam will indicate that you may submit a revised solution to earn back partial credit.

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. Longer answers should have longer 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 resources or tools outside the CS240 course website and the two textbooks

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.