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ENCM 369 Winter 2010 Midterm Information

Contents

• Date, Time, and Location
• Closed-book, no calculators
• Test Topics
• A Note about Integer Add and Subtract Instructions
• Test Format
• Reference Material
• Suggestions for preparation

Date, Time, and Location

The test will be from 6:30 to 8:00pm on Monday, March 1, for both L01 and L02.

Location information is given below. Please make sure you learn the locations of these rooms well before the start of the test!

L01 (Steve Norman's lecture section, which meets Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2:00pm) will write in SB 103. (SB is Science B.)

L02 (Norm Bartley's lecture section, which meets Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12:30pm) will write in EDC 179. (EDC is the Education Classroom Block.)

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Closed-book, no calculators

The test is closed-book--do not not take any books or notes to your seat. Use of calculators or computers during the test is not permitted.

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Test Topics

First, a general principle:

The test will focus mainly on topics that were heavily emphasized in lectures and labs. We are not going to make a lot of marks depend on topics that were given very little coverage in lectures and labs.

The test will cover all material up to and including Lab 5 and the lectures of Thursday, February 25, with the following exceptions:

• You will not have to answer questions about how to use xspim.
• You will not have to understand or write code using the x86-like calling conventions of Lab 5 Exercise E.

There may be a small number of marks associated with material in the assigned reading from Chapters 1, 2, and 3 that was not covered in lectures. Let me repeat that the number of marks related to this material will be either zero or very small.

The number of marks associated with material from lectures February 23 and 25 will be small, but definitely greater than zero, to give you some motivation to attend those lectures and stay up-to-date with course material.

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A Note about Integer Add and Subtract Instructions

The point will be made that although we have used add, addi, and sub for integer addition and subtraction in Labs 2 to 5 and lots of lecture and tutorial examples, real MIPS C compilers will always pick addu, addiu, and subu.

If you look at solutions to old midterms, you'll sometimes see addu, addiu, and subu used, since many old midterms took place at a point in the term where students ought to have been familiar with them.

But this year, the midterm is early, so add, addi, and sub will be acceptable for all addition and subtraction needed to answer midterm problems.

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Test Format

The test will have a similar format to the midterms from the last several years. Questions will be of the following types:

• You will have to write SPIM procedures or other short sequences of SPIM instructions. You may be asked to translate C functions. You may also be asked to write code to perform a specified task without having any C code to work from. When writing code, you must use only the instructions and pseudoinstructions listed on the Reference Material sheet.
• You will have to draw diagrams and/or predict register and memory contents to show that you know how a given SPIM program works.
• You may have to write some short paragraphs (roughly two or three sentences) to show that you understand key terms and concepts from the course.

You will write all of your answers on the question paper, in spaces provided for answers.

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Reference Material

You will be provided with one or two pages of reference material along with the question paper. This material will include:

• A list of all 32 general purpose registers in a MIPS processor.
• Documentation for all of the instructions in a ``Midterm Instruction Subset''.

The reference material page for the 2010 midterm is not ready yet, but it will be very similar to the reference material for the 2009 midterm, which you can find on this page full of old midterm papers and solutions.

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Suggestions for preparation

Here are suggestions for review:

• Re-read the assigned sections from the textbook. Pay particularly close attention to material that got heavy coverage in lectures and/or labs.
• Review lecture notes and lab handouts carefully. Many of the `Read This First' sections in lab handouts contain useful information.
• Re-do lab exercises using pencil and paper, especially those exercises that you found difficult when you first did them. Practice writing complete procedure definitions with pencil and paper--writing code by hand is a bit different from typing code in a text editor, and it's obviously an important skill to develop for tests and exams.
• Re-do the tutorial exercises, but keep in mind that many of the tutorial exercises are too open-ended to make good midterm problems.
• Practice by doing problems from old midterms, but keep in mind that topic coverage and topic order has varied somewhat from year to year in this course.

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