Class Meetings

Both sections meet on Mondays and Wednesdays in Science Building Room B-141.

• Section 9MD3 meets from 9:30 to 10:45 am.
• Section 10MDA meets from 10:30 to 11:45 am.

Unfortunately, you must attend only the section for which you are actually registered. There are several reasons for this:

• The two sections will proceed at their own pace. I plan to cover the same material in both sections, but the two will inevitably get out of synch, so attending the wrong section will cause you to miss material.
• There is not enough room in the classroom to provide seats for more than the actual number of students registered. However, there are still openings in the 9:00 section if you want to change your registration to that section from the later one.
• During the first five weeks, I will be taking attendance to comply with university regulations. If you attend the wrong section, you won't get counted present.

Office Hours

Most office hour business can be handled by email. My address is vickery@qc.edu. Be sure to include "CS-343" in the subject line of every message you send me, and be sure to include your name in the body of each message.

If you want to see me in person, I will be available in my office, Science Building room A-222, from noon to 12:30 each day the class meets. (There will be exceptions when this conflicts with faculty meetings, one day a month.) If that time is not convenient for you, you may make an appointment to meet with me at another time.

Textbooks

There is one textbook for the course:

Murdocca, Miles J. and Heuring, Vincent P.
Principles of Computer Architecture
Prentice Hall, 2000
ISBN 0-201-43664-7

We will be covering material from Appendix A and chapters 7, 8, and 10. Reading assignments are on the Course Schedule web page.

Homework, Quizzes, and Exams

This is the first semester CS-343 is being offered at Queens College, so the following information is tentative.
I will inform you of changes as the semester progresses.

• There will be several homework assignments, but they will count only 1% of your course grade. That is, if there are ten homework assignments, each one will count 0.1% of your course average.

  You must submit your own homework solutions, but you are free to work on the homework assignments with anyone you wish. The idea is to use the homework as a way to reinforce the material in the course, not as a test of your knowledge. I will record whether or not you hand in homeworks by the assigned due dates, but I will not evaluate your homework in any way. Instead, I will send the solutions to you by email after the assignment due date.

• There will be a number of short quizzes based on the homework assignments, which will count 5% of your course grade. The purpose of these quizzes is primarily to motivate you to keep current in your coursework and to help prepare you for the exams. Your quiz average will be the average of your best three^* quiz scores. If you take fewer than three quizzes, the missing ones will count as zeros in your quiz average. (* The exact number will depend on the number of quizzes actually given during the semester.)

• There will be two midterm exams and a final exam. The two midterms will count 30% each, and the final will count 35%. Each exam will cover approximately 1/3 of the course (see the Course Schedule web page for dates), and the final exam will include some reveiw material from earlier parts of the course.

  If your lowest exam score is ten points or less below your middle exam score, its weight will be reduced by 10% and the weights of the other two exams will be increased by 5% each.

Discussion Board

The Blackboard system at online.qc.edu, which you used to access this web page, provides a Discussion Board that I encourage you to use to discuss issues related to this course. Feel free to post questions about the homework assignments there, for example. But if you offer help on the homework, help the requestor figure out how to answer the problem; don't just give the answer.

Check Your Grades (Section 9MD3)

Check Your Grades (Section 10MDA)

You can check the scores I have recorded for your homework, quizzes, and exams from one of the links above. To use this facility, you will need to enter a "code word." The code word is like a password, but it is not as secure as a real password because you must tell me what it is in order to set it up.

Never send a real password to anyone, not even a professor!

See the link to Homework Assignment 1 on the course schedule for details.

Grades become permanent and cannot be changed two weeks after they are posted, so be sure to monitor your grades regularly to be sure they are recorded correctly.