CS 241 Midterm Exam Information - Fall 2009

When and Where

The exam is on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 from 4:30pm to 6:30pm.

Please follow this link to see where you will be writing the midterm.

Aids

Coverage

Coverage of the midterm is through the end of regular languages and scanning. This includes material from lectures, assignments, labs, Unix, and anything designated "homework" during lectures.

Review Assistance

Midterm review sessions have been cancelled due to illness. To review the material, please go over the assignments (1 through 5), your lecture notes, and tutorial material (1 through 7 minus context free grammars).

To make up for a formal midterm review session, the tutor will be available for office hours from 11:30 to 3:30 in MC 4065. If you are in need of review assistance, please attend them.

Reminder: If you're having trouble, feel free to come see the professors, tutor, or TAs during their office hours or during tutorials.

Questions During the Exam

To ensure that no student is unfairly advantaged, proctors will not answer questions individually during the exam. If you feel that a question contains an error, raise your hand. A proctor will bring the concern to the instructors and an announcement will made in all rooms if necessary.

Ways to Study

• Reflect critically on your lecture notes. Understand the big picture and the low-level details.
• Look back at the first five assignments, your solutions and how you got to your solutions.
• Use the tutorial exercises and previous exams as practice.
• Think about what kinds of questions might be on the midterm. Invent some of your own exam questions and share them with friends.
• Write and test actual MIPS code.
• Develop concrete examples of DFAs, both types of NFAs and regular expressions

A sample midterm exam (from Fall 2008) is available here. While older exams are available on the web (for example, from MathSoc) you are cautioned that CS241 has been substantially revised since those exams were given. The instructors, tutor and TAs will not answer questions regarding any previous exam, with the exception of Fall 2008.

Remark Policy

• Do not contact the tutor or instructors immediately with problems related to the exam until you have gone over the entire exam.
• If, after going over the entire exam, you believe there to be problems, write them down with a short explanation of what the problem is and submit them to the tutor or instructors for remarking.
• Remarks will be collected until Friday, November 20th. After this date, the tutor and instructors will remark the exams.
• Once submitted for remark, be prepared for the entire exam to be remarked. You may lose or gain marks by submitting for remark.
• If the problem is an addition error or an error in transferring marks to the front page of the exam, simply write "Addition error" and the question number on the exam or on a seperate piece of paper. These exams will not be remarked as per the above rules. However, when considering these cases, we will only consider the numbers written on the exam, not the content of the answer provided.