Posts Tagged ‘CS 341’

Exams are done!

Monday, August 16th, 2010

…at least for the next 6 months or so. ;) Now that I’ve moved and let my brain cool down, I can finally start working on random projects (and replaying StarCraft II!).

At this point, exams are pretty much routine work. I still hate them though: for the most part, exams merely test a student’s memory retention and ability to work under time pressure (i.e. damn quick – I don’t remember not feeling the crunch on any non-trivial test). Bah. Anyway…

PSYCH 338 went well. The “final” was actually just a second non-cumulative midterm that happened before the actual exam period, giving me some extra leeway for my other courses. Of course, this meant that I had to study for it while working on other assignments (namely OS)… Overall, though, the course didn’t require too much mental effort. :P

BUS 352W was next. I’ve already mentioned earlier that I really enjoyed the course and having an awesome group for the projects definitely added to that experience. :) The final was longer than the midterm (though it wasn’t cumulative) and I didn’t think I’d actually finish (I did – although the last couple of pages looked like scribbles). But, well, I pretty much expected it since we were forewarned.

So that leaves my computer science courses. CS 341 was damned hard as expected. I think the structure of the exam actually hurt me more than it helped (a large portion of it was multiple-choice – a format I disagree with for mathematical exams). For the rest of it, I just can’t come up with decent algorithms without some references and a bit of time to mull things over. The material was still very interesting though. :D

CS 348 was next. I can’t say it was that hard although it was ridiculously long (20+ pages in 150 minutes, hah). What really ticked me off was how easy the 1996 winter final looked in comparison; I was able to answer most of the questions before I started my course review (though it didn’t cover much of the second half of the course), the exam was open book and more time was allocated. Huh?!

And CS 350 gets to be my last exam on Friday the 13th. :P It was actually surprisingly easy, but that was only because the midterm taught me the structure of the exam and the study questions (at the bottom of this page) more than prepared me for the more involved questions (e.g. calculating the maximum size of a file using Unix’s inode structure, tracing through scheduling/paging algorithms, etc.). The only question that really caught me off-guard was something on exponential average (I probably missed it since it was mentioned in only 3 lines throughout the entire course notes). Ah well… It was definitely a fun course even if the assignments were relatively long. Implementing interprocess communication in OS/161 would have been really interesting (that particular assignment wasn’t included in CS 350 though).

Unofficial marks are starting to come out today so we’ll see how stuff went. Next up: stuff about StarCraft II (probably). :P

Midterms: CS 341, CS 348 and CS 350

Friday, June 25th, 2010

…and the second half of the midterm barrage has finally come and gone. I guess it’s back to normal university life?

Anyway, I wrote my CS 350 (Operating Systems) midterm last Friday. As I expected, it was relatively hard. A large portion of it was rote memorization from the lectures, notes and textbook. Then there were a few analytical questions that really required a deep understanding of certain topics (i.e. how virtual addresses are structured to incorporate multi-level page tables, etc.). Good thing ~1/9th of the total marks were for bonus questions. :P

CS 348 (Intro. to Database Mgmt.) and CS 341 (Algorithms) were scheduled back-to-back on Wednesday and Thursday. I don’t have much to say about the former – the course is pretty straightforward especially since I had a lot of prior experience with the material in previous work terms and hobby projects. Algorithms, on the other hand, wasn’t anywhere as easy. Though the topic is very interesting (examples here, here and here), proving optimality and determining time complexity is not. Especially when the proofs lead to equations with chain exponents and logarithms. For the midterm I actually had to leave certain questions unfinished because going through the math alone would eat up all of my time. Meh.

Anyway, it doesn’t look like I can relax for a little while longer since I have a ton of assignments to do for various courses. Out of the frying pan and into the fire much? :P