Midterm Date & Location
The CIS 2400 Midterm will be held Wednesday October 26th during the class period (5:15-6:45 pm) in the lecture hall (Chem 102).
Midterm Policies
You will have 90 minutes to complete the exam. We will be beginning as soon as possible, so please show up to class early if you can. We will the distribute the exam early so that you can read and fill out the front page of the exam, but you should not look at the exam questions until you are told to begin. During the exam, some course staff will be walking around the room to answer any clarifying questions and watch out for any cheating cases.
Materials
- To Bring: pencil, eraser, ONE double-sided sheet (standard Letter size, 8.5x11 inch) of notes.
- Provided: printed exam with space to show work, time keeping, LC4 Instruction Sheet(in black and white), LC4 Single Cycle Diagram, Control Signals Description
- Not Allowed: watch, hat, calculator, cell phone, or any other electronic device.
Clobber Policy
The clobber policy allows you to demonstrate mastery of past material with regard to exams. In particular, you can replace your midterm exam score with the score of the midterm section of the final exam. This does not apply in reverse, we will not replace your midterm section of the final with your midterm exam score.
To accommodate for the midterm subsection of the final exam being harder/easier than the midterm exam itself, we have a formula that accounts for average and standard deviation.
- First, we calculate Potential Midterm Clobber Score with:
(final_midterm_subscore - final_midterm_mean) / final_midterm_std_deviation * midterm_std_deviation + midterm_mean, capped at 100 - Then we take the maximum score between the calculated potential clobber score and the grade you had on the midterm. The higher of the two will be used to calculate your course grade.
Cheating
Cheating is a very serious issue and will be vigorously prosecuted. You are not allowed to:
- Discuss the exam with anyone who has taken it before you or will take it after you
- Bring in outside information outside of the allowed note sheet mentioned above.
- Pass of any work as your own.
- Starting the exam early or ending the exam late
We cannot create a detailed list of everything that would be considered cheating, this would be beyond reasonable to create and to expect students to read. It is up to you know when you are cheating, if you are unsure for any reason if something is cheating, you can ask the instructor. Though if you have to ask, it will likely be considered cheating.
Remember that we have the Clobber policy in place for the midterm, if you end up doing badly, there is always the chance to make it up on the final exam.
Midterm Topics
The midterm topics will cover everything from the beginning of the class, with some exceptions. Below you can find a list of some of the course topics and some of the topics that are exempt from the midterm. If a topic is not listed below, you can ask about whether it is testable material.
Topic Exceptions
- We will not ask questions about Instruction Level Parallelism, Pipelining, or Superscalar processors. We will still ask questions relating to the LC4 Single cycle processor though
- We will not ask the details of I/O in LC4 on the midterm.
- We will not ask questions on C programming
Potential Topics:
- Binary representation
- Encoding things into bits
- unsigned and 2C integers
- Floating point numbers
- bit-wise operations
- CMOS Transistors
- Creating CMOS circuits
- Combinational Logic
- Truth Tables
- Gate Level Logic
- Mux
- PLAs
- Sequential Logic
- D flip flops
- Clock
- Write Enable
- LC4 Assembly
- LC4 Instruction behaviour, syntax, and encoding
- Writing simple LC4 programs
- LC4 Single Cycle Processor
- Understanding the components of the LC4 processor and how they fit together
- Control Signals
Midterm Practice
Advice
We highly recommend that if you look at the old exams, that you first “take” the exam in a test-taking environment before going over the answers. Note that the old exams are written by a different instructor, so while they are still good for practicing the course topics and exam-taking skills, the midterm may feel different in the kind of questions that are asked. The questions that will be gone over in the midterm review lecture will likely be more similar in style to what can be expected on the exam.
You may also find it helpful to review old homework assignments, and lecture polls while studying.
Practice Questions
There will be some review questions gone over in recitation and lecture on Monday the week of the midterm. Check the course schedule and we will post the materials when we have them ready.