Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

In the last meeting of my Computer Systems Organization lecture class for the third term, since we had already finished with my last topic, I just gave them sample questions as to what could come out in the exam.

First I wrote down that the coverage would be from flip-flops onwards, since even though multiplexers were not technically part of their last exam, they were in the bonus questions. And a few students were relieved with that.

I wrote down five questions, unintentionally the most difficult first, which was getting a state table and a state diagram from four functions of four bits. The next was to make a state table, functions and circuit with flip-flops from a non-sequential state diagram. Third was to make the implementation using a particular flip-flop for a sequential counter of a specific number of bits.

Fourth was a voltage vs. time graph of again one particular flip-flop, and last was to model a master-slave configuration.

A lot of the students still chose to work on the first number first despite knowing (or maybe precisely knowing) that it was the most difficult, and even delegated the work separately among their group members.

But then since they did not delegate anyone to work on the other numbers, the period finished before they could reach that point, which means they lost the opportunity to ask me about them, with the exception of less than a handful of students who were able to finish most.

There was also the suggestion of having the exam open notes. I knew this meant they wouldn’t study anymore, so I warned them that the questions would be more difficult if that was what they wanted. To illustrate, I told them that I would be going for up to eight-bit implementations.

If it were closed notes though, I would be asking for the truth tables of flip-flops and other simple concepts found in their notes that they would also be applying to the relatively more complicated questions – if they were able to answer the simple questions correctly, that is.

Session 1075 also took a long time answering the hard problem first. Class dismissed.