ISA Exam

Contents

• ISA Exam Overview
• Exam Logistics
• Honor Code
• Reference material
• Topics
• Study Materials
• Problem retakes (optional)

ISA Exam Overview

• The exam timeline is marked on the calendar:
  • info: Monday 13 April
  • inclass: Wednesday 22 April
• 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 hand-written 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).

Blue books must:

1. Be only hand-written notes (no printing out information to include).
2. Include only information available publicly or from this semester of CS240. For example, all information from lecture slides, in-class exercises, your solutions to prior assignments, released solutions from this semester, etc, are all in scope. Private information (e.g., solutions from a friend in a related class) is not allowed.

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 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.

Reference material

The exam does not focus on memorization and will include specific required information for certain sections (e.g., you do not need to memorize all x86-64 instructions, which would be an impossible task). However, you should know offhand, for example, how to read an x86 addressing mode, how structs are aligned in C programs, where C program constructs are laid out in memory, or how to deference a pointer.

In addition to the per-question reference material, the following reference pages will be provided: ISA reference pages

Topics

• The exam focuses on topics under the Hardware-Software Interface part of the course, plus Processes, Shells, and the basics of Memory Hierarchy & Caching.
  • While the exam does not focus on topics from the earlier Computational Building Blocks part of the course, the ideas are connected, so facility with those ideas may still help.
  • ⁺Optional topics are excluded.
• The exam assumes familiarity with the concepts used by assignments associated with the exam topics.

Study Materials

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

• Lecture slides, videos, and associated exercises
• Lab exercises
• Assignments
• Practice slides from class (Problems only).
• Midterm exams from a similar course at Brown University.
  • Spring 2024: Problems 1-4
  • Spring 2023: Problems 1-4
• 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 CS240 exam. Sample solutions are available.
  • It is sometimes necessary to pick and choose problems.
    • The topics relevant for CS240 are split across the Midterm and Final exams in this other course.
    • These sample exams may also cover some topics, such as floating point numbers and virtual memory, that will not be covered by this CS240 exam, and some topics, such as integer representation and bitwise operations, that still matter, but will not be a primary focus of this CS 240 exam.
  • 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: 2, 3, 4
      • Final: 1, 2, 3, 4
    • Autumn 2018:
      • Midterm: 2, 3, 4, 5
      • Final: M2, M3, M4, M5, F6
• 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.

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.