CSC 236 exam topics
My further office hours
My regular office hours end with the end of classes.
I would like to announce the following additional office hours:
- Wed Dec 8th, 4:10-6:00, in BA 1200.
(This office hour is primarily targetted at CSC 209, and I'll have a computer
there and be doing programming problems. But I can almost certainly answer
some CSC 236 questions too, depending on how busy it is and how the time
goes.)
- Friday Dec 10th, 12:30-1:30 (my office, BA 4234)
- Wednesday Dec 15th, 12:30-2:00 (my office, BA 4234)
If you can't make those times,
please feel free to contact me to make an appointment, even if it's just for
five minutes.
And, of course, you can always send e-mail.
The exam
The exam covers everything in the lectures and assignments, except as excluded
below.
If you've missed some lectures, meet someone else in the class and get copies
of their notes.
It is "cumulative".
The format is much like the midterm, but longer (3 hours allowed).
Aids allowed: One 8½x11" aid sheet (both sides if you like).
No calculators.
And please turn off cell phones, pagers, ...
Exam
timetable (slow; wait to see table, then scroll down)
The exam will potentially cover:
- Proofs and proof techniques
- Induction (chapter 1 of the notes)
- Program correctness (chapter 2 of the notes)
- Recursive definition, recurrence relations, etc (chapters 3 and 4 of the
notes; some structural induction proof examples in chapter 5)
- Propositional calculus (chapter 5 of the notes)
- Predicate calculus (chapter 6 of the notes)
- Languages and Finite Automata (chapter 7 of the notes)
I do mean "potentially" --
obviously a three-hour exam can't be comprehensive over this range of material.
I would, however, like to promise you that the following topics are not going
to be covered in the exam:
- context-free grammars
- axiomatic program correctness (axioms handout; also discussed the
assignment statement axiom in the earlier program correctness section)
- infinite set cardinalities
BRING YOUR STUDENT PHOTO ID CARD.
You will have to put it face up on your desk.
To prepare for this exam, I suggest you go through your notes, assignments,
and so on; but you can't learn this stuff by just reading about it, you
have to do it.
Pursue things you're confused about in assignments or the notes;
do problems.
Find things you don't understand about the material, read, think;
come to understand them. Ask other students, ask your instructor,
come to office hours.
Last fall's exam is posted on the UTSC course web page at
the
end of http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~vassos/teaching/b36/.
(The St George exam was very similar.)
In searching for other old exams, you will want to search for "CSC 238" as
well as CSC 236.
You may also want to review
our midterm paper and solutions.
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