COMP6771 Notices

COMP6771: Advanced C++ (Marks Notice)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Monday 22 August 2022, 12:38:28 PM, last modified Wednesday 24 August 2022, 10:59:57 AM.

Hello everyone!

Please find below important information about ass3 and exam marks.

Ass3 Marks Released

Your marks should now be visible in WebCMS in the "Grades" section (see the bottom of the left sidebar, the thing that looks like histogram). No formal analysis has been done, but generally if students made mistakes they made mistakes in the same areas such as: misusing explicit in the iterator constructors, making things (typedefs, helper structs, etc.) public when they should have been private, making excessive copies of smart_pointers and/or N or E for the purposes of look-up, and also not noticing opportunities to use member initialiser lists or delegating constructors.

Nevertheless:

• If you wish to discuss your style or testing mark, please email the tutor who marked you first .
  • Sometimes tutors make mistakes; sometimes students make mistakes; and all other times something can have just gone wrong, and that's ok. Each marker will have put their name or zID at the bottom of your submission (again, viewable from WebCMS), so you should be able to find that tutors email.
  • If you do decide to talk to your marker about the style & testing mark, please note your mark may go up OR down, depending on if some missed point is brought to light .
  • In the event that you still wish to discuss your mark further, you may forward your conversation with your marker to cs6771@cse.unsw.edu.au, and we will look into things further.
  • If you email cs6771@cse.unsw.edu.au without emailing your marker first, your email will be ignored .
• If something has gone wrong with the automarker, please fill out this form and we will get back to you within one working week:
  • Note: if your code fails to compile because of problems with implementation, there is nothing we can do.
  • Form: https://forms.office.com/r/iMXJmpnJst
  • Please try to be as detailed as possible
  • Note: for any reruns due to compilation error, we will apply a flat penalty of 15%

Due to the tight nature of UNSW trimesters, you have 72 hours to contact your marker or fill in the form. We will be in contact likely within one business day, so please do not delay.

Exam Mark (only) Released

We have also released the raw exam marks, also viewable in the Grades section of WebCMS.

On the whole, most students attained over 50% of the exam marks with a large portion coming from Q1. The largest factor in whether or not a student scored in the 20s (exam was out of 30) was if Q2 was attempted in earnest.

As mentioned in the last notice, we did not test any aspect related to the start tile, and made great efforts to ensure other Q1 spec ambiguities that may impacted implementations were fairly tested.

UPDATE: after looking at the exam marks, we noticed an unacceptably high number of students were spuriously failing autotests because of compiler warnings (such as unused parameter, implicit conversion from unsigned to signed ints) being turned into errors. Though we have stressed throughout the course that your code must compile without error in our build environment, we also are aware and recognise that in a high stress situation like an exam (dissimilar to the assignments) that ensuring this was very difficult.

As such, we have rerun the exam automarker with warnings as errors ( i.e. -Werror and -Wall flags) turned off.

If your code already compiled in our environment without error then this will likely have no effect, but for students who had issues, you may see a small increase in your exam marks, but you may very well see a large increase in your exam marks. No marks were decreased.

That's all we have for now. Take care!

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

COMP6771: Exam is now Over (mostly)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Friday 12 August 2022, 06:08:23 PM.

Hey everyone,

Congratulations on finishing the final exam!

Though it may have been tough at times, I'm certain that most people did better than they thought they did. Often times we are our own worse critiques.

Nonetheless, please read below.

Automarking Q1

I'd first like to say my most sincere apologies for the confusion around the start_tile requirement for Q1 and associated MRs. Though we tested the exam internally, this particular issue happened to slip under our radar and evidently, the spec clarifications around it left many more questions than answers.

To that end, we have decided to NOT autotest specifically the start_tile of Q1 being styled in any particular way . Most of the spec clarifications and MRs were centred around this and the accompanying detailed_styled test. Instead, the parts of the spec which changed the least, if at all, will comprise all of the automarks, since it would be otherwise unfair to students. Once again, I'm deeply sorry for the confusion.

Automarking Q2

There were some concerns about spuriously failing the automarker due to Q2. Rest assured, so long as your template is at least instantiable there will be some partial marks you can achieve.

That is all we have for now, talk soon.

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

COMP6771: Exam is now Live

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Friday 12 August 2022, 02:00:18 PM, last modified Friday 12 August 2022, 05:01:50 PM.

Hello everyone.

The final exam has started.

You can find your own exam at: here .

You have until 5:40pm to complete the exam.

Important Information About the Forum

You should not expect an answers fast on the forum.

Though we will try to get to your questions as they come in, there may be delays of up to 15 or even 30 minutes.

After 4:30pm, there may be longer delays until questions are answered.

As always, try your best to interpret the spec as it is written and do not overthink miniscule details.

Often, your first impressions is correct.

Important Information about Spec Clarifications

If there are any spec clarification, we will send out a merge request to your repo, and update this notice and email about its existence.

Please make sure you accept all Merge Requests promptly to avoid losing any marks.

Good luck!

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

ADDENDUM: due to late deployment, we have added on an extra 10 minutes to the exam time.

The new finish time is 5:40pm

MRs & UPDATES

- 5:00pm - clarified if the q2 type traits are inside or outside scope_guard.

- 4:41pm - fully specified q1 start tile style and modified q1/test1.cpp to reflect this

- 2:55PM - q1 test1.cpp had end tile style in the wrong order

- 2:34PM - uint8 issue and typo in detailed style with regards to duplicate of move::EE. Currently being deployed and should reach you as soon as practicable

COMP6771: Advanced C++ (Week 11? Notice)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Thursday 11 August 2022, 09:38:19 PM.

Hello everyone!

Welcome to Final Exam Eve. This is a quick notice just to keep you updated on all thing C++.

You All Tried This One Trick to Increase Exam Time...

Thank you to everyone who filled out myExperience. For those who are privy, you know that having students, or anyone, fill in a survey is a gargantuan task, but so many wonderful students stepped-up and let us know how we did this term.

To that end, the results are in:

Response Rate: 75% !!!!

You will see the updated time in the exam briefing page on WebCMS.

Note: For those who already had exam time extensions, this is an extension on top of your extension. For example, if previously your deadline was 6:30pm, it is now 7pm.

Assignment 3 Marks

We are currently in the middle of marking assignment 3.

We really hoped that we could get some of the preliminary marks out before the exam. However, time constraints on the teaching staff has resulted in the marks likely being released alongside the final exam marks.

That's all we have for you for now.

See you in the exam.

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

COMP6771: Advanced C++ (Week 10 Notice)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Monday 01 August 2022, 12:21:29 PM.

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the your final teaching week of COMP6771. What a journey I'm sure it's been.

It's almost time for a holiday, but don't hit snooze on you alarms yet! There is important information about the exam below...

Lectures

Reminder that the Tuesday lecture this week will be a guest lecture by Videesha from Optiver. If you are interested in how C++ is used in industry, this will be a lecture to not miss.

The Thursday lecture will be course revision and a formal briefing on the final exam. And then, we will say goodbye.

Exam

Information about the exam can be found here, and in the course sidebar . Make sure you read this information and get thoroughly familiar with when the exam is: the final exam is Friday the 12th of August, 2 - 5pm .

If you have any applicable ELP or Special Consideration that covers the final exam, hopefully by now you have communicated this information with the Lecturer in Charge (and if you haven't, you should ASAP).

We have released a practice exam for you to try. Note that this is to familiarise yourself with the exam conditions and is not necessarily indicative of question style or difficulty. There will be no solutions released.

Try this One Trick to Increase Exam Time...

Feedback on how we were able to teach you C++ is incredibly useful for us. We legitimately want to make this course up-to-date with how the industry uses C++, as well as the most helpful to students. How useful you found this term's lecture format, tutorial format, and overall layout, as well as what you think we did poorly, what you think we should do next time, and even what you loved are all incredibly precious pieces of information for us so that we can continue to provide value to the University, and more importantly, to future students.

To that end, please fill out MyExperience !

⚠️ To sweeten this deal, for EVERY % over 45% that fills in my MyExperience, we will INCREASE the length of the exam by ONE minute. See below for a quick conversion calculator:

!! Click here to fill MyExperience in !!

Assignment 3

Reminder that ass3 is due tonight at 8pm.

Submission as always is just pushing whatever code you have to your master branch on Gitlab.

That's all we have for you for now. Talk soon,

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

COMP6771: Advanced C++ (Week 09 Notice)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Tuesday 26 July 2022, 11:20:15 AM.

Hello everyone,

Welcome to Week 09, our penultimate week together. With the ass3 deadline looming and the final exam not too far off, we truly are entering the final days of this term. Whilst you're working hard, please make sure you read this notice thoroughly!

Lectures

This is our last week of assessable lecture content. Our focus will be on dynamic polymorphism (instead of the static variant) and that inevitably will involve some Object-oriented programming and virtual functions. For some it will likely be a revision of an earlier OOP course, but for others this may be the first time encountering inheritance, subclasses, etc., so make sure to tune in!

Guest Lecture in Week 10

The Tuesday lecture next week will be a guest lecture by Videesha Saparamadu, a UNSW alumni currently at Optiver. She is an accomplished C++ developer and has worked, at one time or another, on almost all of the development teams there. She is currently the leader of the C++ component of their onboarding program and the organiser and key facilitator of their internal C++ continuing education program, so her lecture should be enjoyable and educational.

Ass2 Marks Released

Your marks should now be visible in WebCMS in the "Grades" section (see the bottom of the left sidebar, the thing that looks like histogram). Again we have haven't done any formal analyses, but generally if students made mistakes they made mistakes in the same areas such as: missing marks due to not use the member initialiser list in constructors, marking functions that can throw as "noexcept", and not implementing some operators like operator!= in terms of operator== (so-called "piggybacking"), among others.

Nevertheless:

• If you wish to discuss your style or testing mark, please email the tutor who marked you first .
  • Sometimes tutors make mistakes; sometimes students make mistakes; and all other times something can have just gone wrong, and that's ok. Each marker will have put their name or zID at the bottom of your submission (again, viewable from WebCMS), so you should be able to find that tutors email.
  • If you do decide to talk to your marker about the style & testing mark, please note your mark may go up OR down, depending on if some missed point is brought to light .
  • In the event that you still wish to discuss your mark further, you may forward your conversation with your marker to cs6771@cse.unsw.edu.au, and we will look into things further.
  • If you email cs6771@cse.unsw.edu.au without emailing your marker first, your email will be ignored .
• If something has gone wrong with the automarker, please fill out this form and we will get back to you within one working week:
  • Form: https://forms.office.com/r/LG2dJS0H3C
  • Please try to be as detailed as possible
  • Note: for any reruns due to compilation error, we will apply a flat penalty of 15%

Help Sessions & Ass3

We have four help sessions this week to support students in completing ass3, the first of which is on Thursday 3 - 4pm. You can find the full timetable as always here .

Exam

We will be releasing information about the final exam next week, including a sample exam for you to practise. Stay tuned for that.

That's all we have for you for now. Talk soon,

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

COMP6771: Advanced C++ (Week 08 Notice)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Tuesday 19 July 2022, 11:57:53 AM.

Hello everyone.

Welcome to Week 08 of Advanced C++.

This will be another brief notice with the only aim to keep everyone in the loop about how the course is progressing in its final weeks.

Lectures

This week we will be looking into advanced templates and advanced type manipulations, otherwise known as template meta-programming. These two things form the bedrock of C++'s compile-time programming abilities, so if you really want to become an expert in the language and impress your friends, learning how to manipulate types and metaprogram C++ is the way to go.

Assignment 3

Hopefully by now, most people have had a chance to read over the spec and to digest what assignment 3 is all about. Additionally, this assignment is big enough that thinking of a roadmap or implementation plan before sitting down to code is a good idea.

Make sure you are keeping your repos up-to-date on Gitlab and pulling the latest as we are sending out merge requests to fix small (but not insignificant!) typos in the spec.

Assignment 2

Marking is well under way and we are looking to get your marks and feedback to you early next week.

That's all we have for now. Talk soon,

- COMP6771 Teaching Team

COMP6771: Advanced C++ (Week 07 Notice)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Monday 11 July 2022, 05:55:17 PM.

Hello everyone,

Welcome to Week 07 of Advanced C++. In this notice is a brief overview of what we'll be covering this week, as well as a few reminders about the assignments.

Lectures

Now that we are all freshened up after that busy break last week, we can really start to dig into the weeds of what makes C++ loved and hated. This week we will begin to scratch the surface of C++ templates, one of the most (in)famous and well-known compile-time constructs in C++. Along with templates comes understanding more the rules around type deduction, function template argument deduction, and much more.

Assignment 2

Just a reminder that assignment 2 is due tonigh t at 8pm.

Make sure you push your latest commit to your master branch on Gitlab. This acts as your submission .

The late penalty is 5% per day for 5 days, and then 0 thereafter. Be careful!

Assignment 3

Assignment 3 will be released tonight at around 8pm as well. We will cover by the end of this week much of the material necessary to complete it, so make sure you have a good read of the spec, start to formulate any questions you have, and then strategise a plan on how to complete it.

That's we have for you for now. Talk soon

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

COMP6771: Advanced C++ (Week 06 Notice)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Thursday 07 July 2022, 10:20:35 AM.

Hello everyone!

Hope you are all enjoying your flex week.

This week's notice is a little late as the teaching staff were busy wrapping up assignment 1 marks. We know you've all been patiently waiting for them, and we thank you for patience. See below for more information about this.

Assignment 1 Marks

Your marks should now be visible in WebCMS in the "Grades" section (see the bottom of the left sidebar, the thing that looks like histogram). We have haven't done any formal analyses, but the general gist is most students scored above 10, which is great to .see. It means that in the first 3 weeks of this course, most students quickly acclimated to the C++ ecosystem. Being able to learn quickly and then perform effectively is a useful skill to have.

Nonetheless:

• If you wish to discuss your style or testing mark, please email the tutor who marked you first .
  • Sometimes tutors make mistakes; sometimes students make mistakes; and all other times something can have just gone wrong, and that's ok. Each marker will have put their name at the bottom of your submission (again, viewable from WebCMS), so you should be able to find that tutors email.
  • If you do decide to talk to your marker about the style & testing mark, please note your mark may go up OR down, depending on if some missed point is brought to light .
  • In the event that you still wish to discuss your mark further, you may forward your conversation with your marker to cs6771@cse.unsw.edu.au, and we will look into things further.
  • If you email cs6771@cse.unsw.edu.au without emailing your marker first, your email will be ignored.
• If something has gone wrong with the automarker, please fill out this form and we will get back to you within one working week:
  
  • Form: https://forms.office.com/r/iMXJmpnJst
  • Please try to be as detailed as possible

Assignment 2 + Help Sessions

With assignment 2's due date rolling around quickly, we would like to remind you that there are more help sessions this week again, starting from today.

As always, check the course timetable for when the help sessions are and make sure you get there early!

Course Feedback

Though we don't mention it often (if at all), we have been reading feedback received from students about the 22T2 offering. Just know that your feedback is very valuable to us and we would be very grateful if there is any point of feedback you feel we should hear to send it in to us :).

That's all we have for now, talk soon.

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

COMP6771: Advanced C++ (Week 5 Notice)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Monday 27 June 2022, 03:09:10 PM.

Hello everyone!

This is another weekly notice giving a general update to COMP6771's progression this term.

Lectures

This week's content is on resource management (RAII) in C++ and also on smart pointers (pointer-like types that manage their memory resource). These two concepts together form yet another major reason why C++ is a powerful language.

Help Sessions

As assignment 2 is continuing, we again have two help sessions this week on Saturday. If you need help, want some select feedback, or have any questions about C++, be sure to attend.

That's all we have for now. Another relatively cruisy week.

Keep working hard!

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

COMP6771: Advanced C++ (Week 4 Notice)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Monday 20 June 2022, 08:30:29 PM.

Hello everyone!

This is another weekly notice giving a general update to COMP6771's progression this term.

Lectures

This week's content continues the discussion of the mechanics of class types in C++. We will be covering Operator Overloading and also C++ Dynamic Exceptions , both topics of which will be very useful for ass2.

Assignments

Well done to everyone who has submitted ass1! If you are still working on it, make sure you submit before the hard deadline of Wednesday @ 8pm (unless you have an exception), Due to UNSW policy, any submission received after this deadline will receive an automatic 0.

We will begin marking by the end of this week and are looking to get feedback back to you before the end of Week 6. Stay tuned.

That's all we have for you for now.

Keep working hard!

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

Assignment 2 Released (and hidden ass1 gems)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Friday 17 June 2022, 04:57:22 PM.

Hello everyone!

This is a brief notice about assignment 2 and assignment 1.

Assignment 2

Assignment 2 has been released and is available in your repos on Gitlab.In the coming weeks we will be going through the content that will allow you to complete the assignment, but feel free to read the spec and get a head start on what you can.

The due date is Monday 11th July (Week 7) at 7:59pm AEST.

Assignment 1: Testing Rationale

One potentially easily missed point about testing in assignment 1 is that we are expecting you to write a rationale as a block comment at the top of at least 1 of your test files . This has been listed in the marking criteria since it was released, but attention being drawn to this point was needed. The rationale should explain the intent of your tests and any high level decisions you made during testing, not what your tests are doing.

We also expect a rationale to be written for assignments 2 and 3.

That's all for now, keep working hard!

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

COMP6771: Advanced C++ (Week 3 Notice)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Monday 13 June 2022, 04:48:38 PM, last modified Tuesday 14 June 2022, 03:53:36 PM.

Hello everyone!

Welcome to Week 3 of Adv. C++.

We are almost at the end of the first third of this course and now, moving forward, we will be digging evermore into the specific and unique features that make C++ what it is. As such, this week's focus is on class types (i.e. structs and classes proper).

Please find below two important bulletin points to keep in mind:

Assignment 1 Due

To help with ass1, this week there are four help sessions. The timetable for them can be found here so make sure that if you need to attend one or more that you know when they are.

There are no help sessions on the weekend.

That is all for now. Keep working hard!

-COM6771 Teaching Team

COMP6771: Advanced C++ (Week 2 Notice)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Monday 06 June 2022, 06:15:43 PM.

Hello everyone!

Welcome to Week 2 of Advanced C++. The main theme this week is the S tandard T emplate L ibrary (STL, part of ISO C++ proper) and the design principles behind it. It is perhaps one of the things C++ is both famous and infamous for.

By now many of you have started (and even completed!) Assignment 1. It is excellent to see that so many have started early. Remember, if you have any questions, feel free to post them on the forum.

That's all in news for this week. See you all in the lectures!

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

Assignment 1 Released

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Thursday 02 June 2022, 05:52:03 PM.

Hello everyone,

Assignment 1 has been released.

You should be able to clone it from https://gitlab.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP6771/22T2/students/z5555555/ass1 (replace z5555555 with your zID)

Be sure to start early, and good luck!

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

COMP6771: Advanced C++ (Week 1 Notice)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Monday 30 May 2022, 01:09:18 PM.

Hello all,

You are receiving this notice because you are a student of COMP6771 in 22T2. What this means, among other things, is that you have taken the first steps to become proficient in the language with a wide, varied history and usage known as C++.

The teaching staff would like to offer you a warm welcome. The purpose of this notice is to give a brief overview of how this course is structured and to mention what will be in Week 1.

By now, you have hopefully read the course outline and understand the assessment structure. As a small recap:

• There are three individual assignments, as well as one exam.
• There are no marks associated with the tutorials.

We have lectures on Tuesday 4 - 6pm and Thursday 11 - 1pm. They will be hybrid lectures, where we have an in-person stream as well as an online livestream through MS Teams. Barring no technological issues, you should be able to flexibly attend whichever delivery mode you wish.

Our tutorials also are delivered in a hybrid-fashion. The purpose of the tutorials is for you to cement your knowledge from that week's lecture content, as well as receive direct instruction from your tutor. We recommend making extensive usage of your tutor if you wish to optimise your time in this course.

There are also help-sessions throughout the term where you can get further help with anything in the course.

The locations of all of these can be found in the course timetable .

Week 1 content involves a formal introduction, environment set-up, and a start to the C -> C++ transition. Also, assignment 1 will be released later this week, so check back later for that.

Again, very excited to have you all here with us this term. Hope to see you all in the lecture! (both in-person and virtually)

-COMP6771 Teaching Team

Welcome to COMP6771! (Week 0 Notice)

Posted by Simon Haddad 🥩 Monday 23 May 2022, 03:16:19 PM.

Hello everyone, and welcome to COMP6771!

• If you haven't already, please check out the course outline and make sure you understand this course's assessment structure and weightings.
• Please join the forum and add a self-introduction under the Introduction post. This is the first time since 2019 that this course is running with in-person and online classes, so we want to make sure that we all get to know each other as best we can.
• Make sure you check where and how your class is being delivered by looking at the course timetable .

That's all we have for now. Talk again soon.

-COMP6771 Teaching Team