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.

On Thursday I had my second and third final exams, for Assembly Language Programming and for my Robotics lecture class.

For the first one, I gave them an exam which is just from their exercises, converting a thirty two bit number from its hexadecimal form to its decimal form for display using long division and arrays.

In the instructions, I said that this is in response to getting a relatively easy (and group! although I won't go so far as to have them answer in group - but in retrospect, why not?) final exam in my Ethical Hacking class. I also told them to pay it forward.

Besides that, I also did something I hadn't done since a year ago when a certain student was their classmate in Electromagnetic Theory class.

Whe I saw them in the cafeteria before the exam, I already gave them the papers, so they had time to discuss it with their classmates (and get some of the necessary papers, since it was open notes and books after all) prior to meeting in the room.

The exam, by the way, also required them to give the flowchart of the program that I know they had finished (although the flowchart should have been done first) and to give the execution table (as usual) for one possible given input.

Of course, for the flowchart, I asked them not to just replicate the assembly language commands (as well as for the conditional statements) but to write down the simple equation slash operation equivalents such as "ax = ax + bx" or "is al > 0?".

Surprisingly, they still were not able to finish it, even though there were several shortcuts to the execution table I thought they would have used.

One way would have been to perform the long division first so that they know what the output has to be then fill that in the table.

No one complained about it being too difficult though, because it was still something entirely new to think about, but assumed studied.

Session 1947 now wishes all his teachers are still studying and afraid of karma. Class dismissed.