The class meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 10:30 to 11:45 in SB B-141.
Most office hour business can be handled by email. My address is vickery@qc.edu. Be sure to include "CSCI 343" in the subject line of every message you send me, or your message will be rejected by my spam filter. Also, be sure to sign your email with your real name, or I won't answer it.
I apologize for being somewhat arbitrary about these email policies but, like everyone else, I'm getting deluged with spam and virus messages and need to manage my messages as efficiently as possible.
If you want to see me in person, I will be available in my office, Science Building room A-222, for half an hour after each class. If that time is not convenient for you, you may make an appointment to meet with me at another time.
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.
You will be using two or three pieces of free software for this course; you will need a PC to run them.
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. Submitting an assignment on time gives you full credit for it, no matter whether your answers are correct or not.
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.
I encourage you to use the "Discussion Board" facility at QC Online to ask questions about the homework assignments. I also encourage you to answer other people's questions there: helping others is a great way to study the material.
There will be two midterm exams and a final exam. Each exam will count 33.3% of your course average. Each exam will cover approximately 1/3 of the course (see the Course Schedule web page for dates). The final exam will not be cumulative unless I announce otherwise beforehand.
If your lowest exam score is ten points or more 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.
The above percentages are subject to minor changes, which will be announced if they are made. For example, the FPGA assignment will count more than regular homework assignments.
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.
You can check the scores I have recorded for your homework, quizzes, and exams from the above link. 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. See Assignment 1 on the course schedule page for more information.
Never send a real password to anyone, not even a professor!
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.