UP ONE LEVEL: ENCM 369 Winter 2004 Handout List

The University of Calgary
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

ENCM 369:
Computer Organization

Course Outline for the 2004 Winter Session

Author: Steve Norman
Last modified: Sun Jan 18 18:51:53 MST 2004

Contents


Correction

The paper version of this handout had wrong information about one of the tutorial sections. That information has been corrected in this online version.

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Preface

This document is the official course outline, as specified in the U of C Calendar. It contains information about
  • who the lecture and laboratory instructors are;
  • where and when the lectures, labs and tutorials take place;
  • course content;
  • course textbooks;
  • policies for assignments, exams, tests, and course grading.
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    Lecture and Tutorial Instructor

    Dr. S. A. Norman (L01, T01, L02, T02)
    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
    Office: ICT 411
    Phone: 220-8642
    Email: norman@enel.ucalgary.ca

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    Lectures

    Lecture section L01 meets Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 8:00am in ICT 121.

    Lecture section L02 meets Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon in EN A 103.

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    Laboratory Sections

    Laboratory sections begin Thursday, January 22. (There are no labs during the week of January 12.) You will have a lab section almost every week. You will be given more precise information about the laboratory schedule as the term progresses.

    All laboratory sections take place in ICT 215, except for B03 and B04--those two sections will share ICT 215 and ICT 216.

    DAY     TIME              SECTION         LAB INSTRUCTOR
    
    Thu     2:00pm-3:15pm     B01             to be announced
    Thu     9:30am-10:45pm    B02             to be announced
    Thu     3:30pm-4:45pm     B03             Dr. Norman
    Thu     3:30pm-4:45pm     B04             to be announced
    Fri     2:00pm-3:15pm     B05             to be announced
    

    In addition to Dr. Norman, there will be one other lab instructor in this course. The name of this instructor will be announced in the lectures and on the course Web page as soon as the appointment has been made.

    Please note the number of your lab section. (``B01'' stands for ``laBoratory section 1''.) You should write your lab section number on every assignment you hand in and type it into every file of source code you work on.

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    Tutorials

    Tutorials will start on Tuesday, January 20. (In other words, there will be no tutorials on Jan. 13.)

    Tutorial section T01 meets Tuesdays at 2:00pm in EN E 239.

    (Note the correction in the following sentence.) Tutorial section T02 meets Thursdays Tuesdays at 4:00pm in EN E 239.

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    Course Content

    NOTE: the list below does NOT give the precise order in which topics will be covered.

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    Required Textbook

    David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy, Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface, 2nd edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 1998.

    This course will follow the textbook closely. To be successful in this course, students should spend a significant amount of time reading and re-reading sections of the text that are covered in the course.

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    Laboratory Assignments

    Some assignments are to be completed by each individual student and others are to be completed by pairs of students. A note near the top of each lab handout will specify whether the assignment is to be done by individuals or by pairs.

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    Get Help, But Don't Cheat!

    Do the individual assignments by yourself. If you copy someone else's work or let someone else figure out all the difficult exercises for you, you will not learn very much.

    This does not mean that you should not get help from others while you are doing your assignments. You are encouraged to discuss the assignments with instructors and fellow students, since this is one of the best ways to learn the material. However, you should not let anyone write your programs for you. When you hand in your assignments, ask yourself two questions:

    Do I understand every line of code I wrote?
    Could I do this assignment over again without any help?
    The answer to both questions should be YES.

    Computers allow electronic copying of programs, which makes it very easy to cheat in a course like ENCM 369. If you are caught cheating you may be reported to the Dean's Office for appropriate discipline. If you cheat and don't get caught, you are still in trouble, because examination marks count much more than assignment marks in your final course grade.

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    Helping Cheaters is Academic Misconduct

    Helping students to hand in work that is not their own is a form of academic misconduct. This point is made very clearly in the University of Calgary calendar.

    Therefore, your instructors believe that distributing solutions to lab exercises before the lab assignment due date is a serious form of academic misconduct. If we discover such activity, we will report it to the Dean's Office immediately. Distributing solutions means making solutions available to other students via paper copy, electronic mail, Web site, or any other medium.

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    Missed or Delayed Term Work

    You are expected to complete all lab assignments and hand them in on time, and you are expected to write the mid-session test at the scheduled time.

    If you don't hand in some term work due to illness, domestic affliction, or another legitimate reason, your instructors are willing to make accommodations, but only if you report the problem to Dr. Norman (not the other lab instructor, and not a graduate teaching assistant) as soon as is reasonably possible. Accommodations for missed term work will be decided on a case-by-case basis; typically they will involve either accepting lab assignments after the due date or making changes to the weighting used to compute the course grade.

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    Examinations and Course Grading

    There will be one mid-session test. The date and time of this test have not yet been decided. It is likely that a common test for sections L01 and L02 will take place one evening shortly after Reading Week. When the details are known, they will be announced in lectures.

    The mid-session test and the final examination will be closed-book--you may not bring any books or notes. You may not use electronic calculators or computers during either the mid-session test or the final exam.

    Here is the weighting that will be used to assign grades:

    Lab assignments:    20%
    Mid-session test:   30%
    Final examination:  50%
    

    Regardless of your assignment and midterm marks, if your mark on the final exam is less than 40 percent, you will fail the course. Regardless of your assignment and midterm marks, if your mark on the final exam is greater than or equal to 40 percent and less than 50 percent, your grade will be D+ or lower.

    Conversion from a score out of 100 to a letter grade will be done using a scale determined after the final examination has been marked. This allows the creation of a scale appropriate to the relative difficulty or easiness of the mid-session test and final exam.

    As a rough guideline, here is the scale used in last year's version of the course:

    ENCM 369 Winter 2003 (Last Year's) Letter Grade Formula
    
    course grade      minimum course score
       A+                      93.5
       A                       89.0
       A-                      84.5
    
       B+                      80.0
       B                       75.5
       B-                      71.0
    
       C+                      66.5
       C                       62.0
       C-                      57.0
    
       D+                      51.0
       D                       45.0
    
    For example, a student with 18.77 / 20 for labs, 19.00 / 30 for the mid-session test, and 37.08 / 50 for the final exam would have got a course score of 18.77 + 19.00 + 37.08 = 74.85 and would have been given a B- in the course.

    The scale used this year will be similar to but probably not identical to last year's scale.

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    Freedom of Information and Privacy

    Please read this section carefully. The text below is the official policy of the Faculty of Engineering and must be respected in this and all other courses in the faculty. The policy went into effect starting with the 1999 Fall Session.
    FACULTY OF ENGINEERING
    UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
    POLICY FOR IMPLEMENTATION OF FOIP REQUIREMENTS
    
    Protection of Student Examinations and Course Work Under the
    Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act
    of the Province of Alberta
    
    The following outlines the Faculty of Engineering policy that will
    ensure that examinations and term-work of students in engineering
    courses are protected with respect to privacy.  The philosophy behind
    the policy is that marked student examinations and term-work
    (hereafter called ``student's work'') should be available only to the
    student and to staff in the Faculty of Engineering who have a need to
    see the material.  This includes academic staff, graduate assistants
    and support staff.
    
    1. All student's work will be returned in class, laboratories, or
       tutorials, (hereafter called classrooms), as appropriate.
    
    2. Staff members will take reasonable steps to supervise the return of
       the student's work in classrooms.  It is not required that each
       student be called up by name to receive his/her work.
    
    3. The person returning the student's work in the classroom has the
       right to see identification from the student before the work is
       returned.
    
    4. Material that is not collected by a student during the first
       occasion when it is brought back to a classroom will be returned to
       the classroom at reasonable intervals by a staff member.
    
    5. Students shall not approach instructors, graduate students or
       support staff in their offices to pick up their work.
    
    6. Term-work not picked up by a student at the end of the term shall
       be retained on file by the department responsible for the course
       for a period of one year.  The Faculty will retain final-examination
       papers for a period of one year.
    
    7. Any student's work that may be exposed to the view of other
       students shall not have the grade or mark displayed on the front
       page.
    
    8. A student's name and U of C ID number shall not both be written by
       the student on the cover page of any work submitted for evaluation.
    
    9. A student shall not pick up any marked work that does not belong to
       the student.
    
    10. This statement shall be attached to every course outline handed
        out in the Faculty of Engineering.  Departments may attach
        additional statements to courses controlled by them.
    

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    Other Course Information

    You are strongly encouraged to use the World Wide Web to look up course information. For example, you will be able to use the Web to read
  • this outline;
  • information about the teaching assistants;
  • many lecture-related handouts;
  • all lab handouts;
  • some lab solutions.
  • (Not much of this information will be available right at the beginning of the term. The set of course pages will grow as the term progresses.)

    The URL for the ENCM 369 Home Page is

    http://www.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/Norman/encm369winter2004/
    

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