Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Last Friday we were supposed to have our third exam in Assembly Language Programming.

But we didn't push through because it was the birthday of one of the students (the student council vice president in fact, and the president's birthday was the day before) and besides that they knew that I was going to have to dismiss them early to leave for our college faculty retreat, so they used that one and a half hour shortness of class (out of four and a half hours) as an excuse for not getting the "full potential" of that session from the remaining three hours.

As usual I gave them the option of reward later and relatively easier difficulty now or the other way around, which in this case was that I would start on a more difficult topic on the time that was supposed to be for their exam, and that topic would now be included in their exam, which this time was arrays.

The thing was, this time around they agreed on the reward now difficulty later, which I thought they would not take, saying that they would have an exam with arrays in their future anyway, so it didn't matter, which was not really what I'm used to.

Now, the exam I gave them was to get the base ten digits of a five digit number using division of base sixteen digits and the pre-set multiplication and division operations in assembly language.

This they would expand to nineteen digits (64 bits) for their next exercise, which so far they have only been displaying in hexadecimal or base 16 instead of decimal or base 10 like in previous exercises. At least it was something different.

The problem was that their exam did not use loops, but instead used the the four standard sixteen bit registers, so there was some confusion on what the register contained at all points.

So even though there were some students who got the values right to the end, they couldn't figure out what the intention of the program code was because it wasn't consistent with what I originally planned. So I just settled for their values.

But I did give them the corrected code to be submitted as a group assignment next meeting.

Session 1903 never forgets when a teacher makes a mistake. Class dismissed.