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.

My first exam for finals week was Computer Systems Organization. I had to come up with just one exam for lecture and lab despite originally requesting one for each with the college secretary because of incredibly unfortunate conflicts in schedule (starting from the learner-centered education seminar that ran over a lot of my classes and getting the ripple effect from there) that resulted in no less that three of my set final exam schedules having conflicts with other activities that I had to be present at, particularly the last of the robotics competitions.

Since the students finally opted for closed notes, even though a lot of the slacker students had already photocopied other students’ notes (because I still do not allow sharing of notes if it were open notes) then I did include the truth tables of the flip-flops in my questions.

I also had about half a dozen “sets” of questionnaires, but actually being based on having just two sets of similar questions (using any of the four basic flip-flop designs) being mixed and matched in one paper.

The students assumed though, that if their first question is different from their neighbor’s (and they did ask, right in front of the teacher) then their entire set is different, which was incorrect. If they had checked further they would have found that the latter questions were the same.

And this time, I did put the easier questions first and the more difficult questions in the end. No use assuming that the students would read all the questions first then work on the easier ones first and the harder ones later.

I was surprised that there were still some students who did not remember how to proceed from the truth (or state) table to the K-map to the function, which was from the very first lessons and applied all throughout.

I also added a final question just asking for the sequential state diagram of a seven segment display, just to make sure they read on the last topic we discussed.

There were still some students though who still believed they would fail in the subject afterwards, and told me so in no minced words.

Session 1077 forgot K-maps. Class dismissed.