A Week Past.

Well, not quite. Its actually been six days since my Wednesday from hell. I had two exams in a row last Wednesday and had no idea what to expect on them. With a list of over 25 topics for each one, I was trying to figure out how the instructor could narrow them all down to a 50 minute exam.

The first exam ended up being nothing as expected, earning me a low mark on it. However, since everyone seemed to have the same outcome, a curve is looking good. Every question on the exam seemed to be something completely off topic compared to what we were required to do for the homework and the labs. I guess the instructor didn't understand the meaning of their own syllabus when they said that the exams will be based on homework.

The second exam was a killer for anyone. This exam was beyond reason. It started off by asking to convert this 32bit binary number into decimal.

1010 1101 1110 1110 1111 1111 1111 1111

Now, I have to admit that I do not know what the 31st power of 2 is. Nor do I know what anything above the 16th power of 2 is. To think that we were to do this conversion without the use of a calculator was completely dumbfound. The question did ask us to also convert the binary number assuming it was a 2's compliment, a IEEE 754 Decimal Number, and the machine code for a MIPS process.

The second exam also required us to memorize the Single Cycle Data Path and be able to modify it for a new process never covered in the class discussion (ISZ - Increment, Skip if Zero). Now, I do not have the time of day to memorize a complete data path, nor do I have the ambition to. I am expecting low marks here as well, which isn't good.