Midterm Date & Location

The CIT 5950 Midterm Exam will be held Wednesday February 28th from 7:00pm-9:00 pm in Towne 100.

Midterm Policies

You will have 120 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.

Exam Format

The exam will consist mostly of short answer questions. There may be some multiple choice, but if there is, you will also have to justify your answer in a few sentences. It is important for your justifications and answers to not just cite a topic, but to also tie the topic back into the question being asked.

For example, consider the question asked in lecture “Would it be better to iterate over a matrix by column or by row, considering that it is laid out in memory like this: … “

A Good answer would be something like this: “It would be best to go row by row. From the memory layout, we can see that all the contents of a row are next to each other in memory. So, if we were to iterate over a row, our program would be able to take advantage of spatial locality (the fact that we are accessing memory near each other) and caches to have better performance reading the matrix.”

A bad answer would be something like this: “It would be better to go row by row because of caches”.

The bad answer does cite a reason, but does not connect it to the question and thus does not show sufficient understanding of the concept.

The exam is also designed to take most people less than 2 hours to do. We do not write the exam with the intention of it being a time-pressure. In previous semesters where we did an in-person exam, most people left early. It is ok if you do need/want the full two hours, just know that we do not intend to pressure people on time.

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
• 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. We will make the second midterm cummulative, and you can think of the second midterm has having a “sub section” that covers the material on the first exam. You can replace your first midterm exam score with the score of the sub-section of the second midterm exam. This does not apply in reverse, we will not replace your sub-section score of the second midterm with your first midterm exam score.

To accommodate for the subsection of the second midterm exam being harder/easier than the first midterm exam itself, we have a formula that accounts for average and standard deviation.

1. First, we calculate Potential Midterm Clobber Score with: (second_midterm_sub_score - second_midterm_sub_mean) / second_midterm_sub_std_deviation * first_midterm_std_deviation + first midterm_mean, capped at 100
2. Then we take the maximum score between the calculated potential clobber score and the grade you had on the first midterm. The higher of the two will automatically 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 first midterm, if you end up doing badly, there is always the chance to make it up on the second midterm.

Topics

The first 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 first midterm. If a topic is not listed below, you can ask about whether it is testable material.

Topic Exceptions

• We will not ask questions to see if you memorized the minutiae of various C and C++ functions. If needed, we will provide some relevant documentation. There are some things you will have to memorize though, such as the basics of using some STL Containers (vector, map), and general basics of the C++ language.

Potential Topics:

• C++ Language
  • references
  • objects
  • memory allocation
  • const
• C++ Standard Library
  • string
  • optional
  • variant
  • vector
  • map
• System Calls
  • File Descriptors
  • read/write and I/O
  • What is the OS?
• Processes
  • fork()
  • Process Isolation
  • Concurrency
• Threads
  • processes vs threads
  • parallelism
  • Concurrency
  • pthreads
  • data races and race conditions
  • mutex
  • condition variables
• Caches
  • spatial & temporal locality
• Scheduling Algorithms
  • First Come First Serve (FCFS)
  • Shortest Job First (SJF)
  • Round Robin (RR)
  • Slight variations of the above

If you don’t see something listed above as a potential topic or an exception, then feel free to post on Ed and we will clarify whether you may be tested on it in the exam.

Midterm Practice

The questions that will be gone over in the midterm review lecture (Monday Feb 26th) will likely be the most similar in style to what can be expected on the exam. Other than that, we encourage you to go through the pollev questions from past lecture, the check-in Quizzes, and the recitation questions for practice. Aside from the in-class midterm review, the recitation questions are probably the most helpful for practice.