Midterm-Info

General Info

  • Midterm exam on Thursday, June 19th during class time

  • In normal lecture room (C9001)

  • You will have ~100 minutes to complete the exam. Timing can be tight.

  • You may not be able to write exam if you arrive more than 30 minutes late.

  • If sick, please email instructor and stay home. In most cases no doctor's note is required. Instructor may require University's Health Care Provider Statement, but don't get one unless requested. We will hold make-up oral exams, though expected to be more challenging than the written one.

  • CAL students watch for CAL instructions for the exam.

  • Sample midterm from Fall 2023. Use for an idea about content; however, created by another instructor!

  • Students must attain an overall passing grade on the weighted average of exams (quizzes/midterms/final) in the course in order to obtain a clear pass (C- or better).

Material

  • Lecture content on slides #0-Welcome through #6-Virtual Memory inclusive. #7-Threads not covered.

  • You should memorize the common syscalls we have used such as fork(), waitpid(), exec(). Don't need to memorize header files.

  • More complicated ones (like sigaction() and its struct) would be given to you.

  • Textbook material not covered in lecture is not testable; textbook/references may give better understanding of topics we did cover.

    • Assignments A0-A7.

    • Labs 1-4.

  • Focus is likely to swing a little towards lecture material, but it's all testable.

Resources in Exam

  • No aids permitted, such as: calculators, textbooks, dictionaries, cell-phones, smart-watches, pocket-gnome, poll-the-audience, or ask-a-friend.

  • I will be happy to explain non-technical terms.

  • Possible Question Types

    • Multiple choice. Warning: These tend to be challenging questions!
    • Short answer.
    • Write, understand, and explain systems programming in C such as done in lecture, in labs, or on assignments.
    • May have to write C code; length of code will be more like a function.

  • Exam is written on paper: no computers.

Exam Directions

  • Find a seat with an exam.

  • Do not sit near your friends or study-mates: they think like you do!

  • If you like to look around, then sit at the front.

  • Take out:

    • Your Student ID
    • Writing tools: pens, pencils, eraser, whiteout...
    • Water bottle, cookies...

  • Put everything else at the front of the room.

    • Cell phones and smart-watches off and at front. Not for checking time.
    • Fill out the front of the exam.

  • Any academic dishonesty may lead to a grade of 0 for the entire exam.

    • Touching a cell phone / smart-watch during the exam will be considered academic dishonesty.

  • Communicate only with a TA or the instructor.

    • Do not look around room at other students.
    • When thinking, look up, not around the room.

  • Cover your paper as much as reasonably possible.

  • You have 100 minutes once told to begin.

  • You may not leave the exam during the first 30 minutes, or the last ~10 minutes.

Good luck!