Midterm Date & Location
The CIS 4480/5480 Midterm Exam will be held Wednesday June 25th from 7:00pm-9:00 pm. The PDF will be posted to gradescope. From there you can either:
- print a copy of the exam and write on it
- write your answers on a new sheet of paper Once you are done writing on the exam, you are expected to scan your exam and upload it to gradescope. We will give some extra time to account for this, but because of this, exams that are late will not be considered. You must hand write your answers on physical paper somehow and upload a scan.
There are many ways to scan a peice of paper with your phone. Travis has used Genius Scan before, but the others are mentioned frequenetly online as reliable. We suggest you test these yourselves before hand to make sure you know how to use them during the exam.
- Genius Scan
- Adobe Scan
- Google Drive
- Microsoft Lens
- Apple Notes
If you are for some reason unable to scan your written answers, do not panic. Instead just take a picture of them with your phone and either upload them to gradescope or email them to the instructors ASAP.
Midterm Policies
The exam is designed around you having 90 minutes to complete the exam. However, we are giving you a total of 120 minutes (2 hours) to account for time needed to print and upload your answers to gradescope. The exam is open-note, though we ask you to please take this seriously still and not to cheat. We think it is appropriate to look at course materials, and any notes you have taken or code you have you have written for the course. Anything outside of this is not OK. We are trying to write the exam to be respectful of the 90 minutes we expect you to take on it, and we are also writing the exam to itself be a learning expereince for you. This is not just a way for us to “discipline” you. We are trusting you to have academic integrity.
During the exam, the Ed discussion board will be configured so that you can only post private posts. Course staff will be monitoring these posts to answer any clarifying questions you may have. Note that there may be a slight delay in us responding but we will try to respond ASAP.
Materials
- To Bring: pencil, eraser, notes, your brain :)
- Provided: printed exam with space to show work, ed discussion to ask clarifying quesitons
- Not Allowed: Working with others, paying someone to take the exam for you, external sites like Stack overflow or any AI assistants..
Clobber Policy
The clobber policy allows you to demonstrate mastery of past material with regard to exams. We will make the final cummulative, and you can think of the final exam has having a “sub section” that covers the material on the first exam. You can replace your midterm exam score with the score of the sub-section of the final exam. This does not apply in reverse, we will not replace your sub-section score of the final with your midterm exam score.
To accommodate for the 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_sub_score - final_sub_mean) / final_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 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 midterm, if you end up doing badly, there is always the chance to make it up on the final exam.
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 to see if you memorized the minutiae of various C functions. If needed, we will provide the relvant parts of the corresponding man page(s) for you.
- These topics cover everything through the beginning of Monday June 23rd.
Potential Topics:
- System Calls
- File Descriptors
- read/write and I/O
- process system calls (fork, pipe, etc)
- Processes
- Process Groups
- Terminal Control
- Inter Process Communication
- pipes
- signals
- FAT & LINUX / UNIX file systems
- contigious Allocation
- Linked-List Allocation
- FAT
- Inodes
- directories
- Super blocks
- Scheduling
- History & ENIAC
- FCFS
- SJF
- Round Robin & Variants
- Multi Level Feedback Queues
- CFS
- Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First
- Threads
- Threads vs Processes
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
Advice
We highly recommend that you do some of these questions in a “test-taking environment” before going over the answers. 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, lecture polls and check-in quizzes while studying.
Practice Questions
There will be some review questions gone over in recitation and lectures the week of the midterm. Check the course schedule and we will post the materials when we have them ready.
Old Review Questions
Note that these review questions are written by a different instructor, so while they still may be useful for practicing the course topics and exam-taking skills, the midterm will feel different in the kind of questions that are asked. Some of the questions will also asked things not gone over in this course. If you are unsure if something has been covered, feel free to ask on the course ed.
Old Exams
Note that the 23fa exams was written following a different topic ordering, so some of the topics have not been covered yet. Some of these questions may be useful for practicing the course topics and exam-taking skills, but some of the questions will also asked things not gone over in this course yet. If you are unsure if something has been covered, feel free to ask on the course ed.
23fa also had two midterms instead of a midterm and a final, which affects the exam design.