COMP9020 Notices

Notices

  • Final Exam review requests

    Posted by Ron Van der Meyden Tuesday 23 December 2025, 10:46:34 PM.

    There have been many requests for review of final exam results. If you sent me email requesting a review of your final exam, or placed a formal review request with the university by Monday Dec 24, your generalised answer sheet has been re-examined. If you have not heard otherwise from me, the marking has been verified as correct.

    As this was a multiple choice exam, there is no room for discretion, and your final exam mark stands and there is no change to your course result. A low final exam mark may have resulted from negative marking of incorrect answers. A usual passing grade would be 50%, so the exam hurdle, at 40%, already generously includes an allowance for minor issues with the exam, so no concessions will be made with respect to the hurdle.

    The university is now closed for the holidays and I am on annual leave for the next month. I will not be responding to email until the final week of January 2026.


  • COMP9020 Course results

    Posted by Ron Van der Meyden Thursday 18 December 2025, 11:12:16 AM.

    If you would like to see how your COMP9020 course result was obtained, please run the following command on a CSE server:

    9020 classrun -sturec

    You will see the following fields:

    quizwX - quiz result from week X /2

    QuizResult - sum of top 7 quiz marks / 14 (Q)

    midterm - midterm exam mark /26 (M)

    final - final exam mark /60 (F)

    There are then fields for the different ways the above results Q,M,F can be combined (See the review lecture for the formulas.)

    CourseResult is the maximum of these different ways.

    The university system may show a field ASST - please ignore this, as it is a just hack to get around the fact that the complicated formula we are using in this course is not easily handled by the university system. Your grade for the course in the university system should be the same as you see in the CourseResult field.

  • Final Exam solutions

    Posted by Ron Van der Meyden Thursday 27 November 2025, 11:43:08 AM.

    I posted the wr sample solution set before. The correct one has now been posted.

  • Sample Final exam Solutions

    Posted by Ron Van der Meyden Wednesday 26 November 2025, 07:37:33 PM.

    Solutions to the sample final exam have now been posted under Lectures Week 10.

  • Sample Final Exam

    Posted by Ron Van der Meyden Friday 21 November 2025, 07:14:57 PM.

    The sample final exam is now available under week 10 lectures. Solutions will be released mid week 11.

  • Additional Tutorial Questions

    Posted by Kevin Luong Friday 21 November 2025, 05:58:26 PM.

    The additional questions that were used in tutorials this term are now available next to the problem sets.

  • Help Session in Week 11

    Posted by Ron Van der Meyden Friday 21 November 2025, 05:02:59 PM.

    There will be one additional help session for COMP9020 in week 11, as follows:

    Room 1043 in K-H13 (Red Centre) from 2-4pm on Tuesday Nov 25.

  • Midterm test result

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Tuesday 04 November 2025, 07:29:03 AM.

    Your mark for the mid-term test is now available on Moodle, where you can review

    • your answers for the multiple choice questions and the correct options for each question, and
    • your answers for the open questions and how they scored against the marking criteria.
    For Question 5a, note that the question was asking for a normal form of a Boolean expression, cf slides 43-53 (week 2). Still, we awarded partial marks for a normal form that used propositional logic operators instead if it corresponded to the correct Boolean term. Question 5b asked to reason based on your answer to part (a); again, partial marks were awarded for an explanation that did not do this.

    For Question 6a, we gave a partial mark when an Euler path was not found but a correct explanation was given for why the graph has no Euler circuit.

    Please continue to respect UNSW's policy to not copy, record, photograph or translate any of the questions of the midterm test. You can ask your friendly tutor if you have any further questions about the correct answers for any of the questions in the test.

    Michael

  • Mid-term Test starting in 2.5 hours

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Thursday 23 October 2025, 11:58:28 AM.

    A friendly reminder that the mid-session test will begin soon. You can find the test on Moodle or access it directly through this link:

    Midterm Test - Thursday, 23 Oct

    The test will open at 2:30pm and automatically close 1 hour after you have started it or at 3:35pm the latest (even if you have started after 2:35pm).

    Time is important, but keep in mind that you have an average of 6 minutes per multiple-choice question and 15 minutes per open question, plus reading time.

    Best of luck everyone,
    Michael

  • Lost and found: phone

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Tuesday 14 October 2025, 11:30:20 AM.

    If you attended the lecture this morning and are missing your mobile phone, please come to my office (K17, Room 310) today during consultation hours (12.30-1.30) or email me.

  • Additional Help Session

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Monday 29 September 2025, 01:36:46 PM.

    Please note that from this week (week 3) on, we offer an additional help session on Tuesdays, 2pm - 4pm . If you have any questions about the course contents that you would like to raise to get help outside of your tutorial, please drop into room 1043 in building K-H13 (Red Centre) at any time between 2 and 4 in the afternoon to meet and ask one of our friendly tutors. To find room 1043, look for the entrance to the School of Mathematics/Centre Wing and go to the first floor.

  • Welcome to COMP9020: Foundations of Computer Science

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Friday 12 September 2025, 01:58:46 PM.

    Dear COMP9020 Student,

    Welcome to this year's Term 3 course.

    This is a reminder that our course will begin in week 1 on Tuesday (16 September) from 9am-11am in Ainsworth G03 (Building K-J17).

    Meanwhile, have a look at the course webpage webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP9020/25T3/ . Read through the " Course Overview " to learn more about the contents of the course, the assessment and recommended textbook.

    See you next week,
    Michael

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