Notices

  • Supplementary exam (29 January)

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Thursday 27 January 2022, 03:15:39 PM.

    If you are eligible to sit the supplementary exam on 29 January, please note:

  • Supplementary exam

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Monday 10 January 2022, 02:05:04 PM.

    If you are eligible to sit the supplementary exam, please note:

  • Your Feedback

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Friday 17 December 2021, 12:31:59 PM.

    Dear COMP9024 Student,

    I want to thank everyone for your detailed feedback on myExperience. I was very happy to see a final response rate of nearly 70% and that (almost) everyone who gave feedback was very satisfied with the course. I have read every comment (including yours, anonymous student, who wrote your longest ever and expressed hope that I do get to see it!), and I assure you that I will consider all your suggestions for further improvement at the next offering of this course. Specifically I will aim for better overall timing of lectures, consultations, and weekly deadlines, which unfortunately was made very difficult this time with both lectures scheduled in the morning and on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

    Have a good seasonal break everyone,
    Michael

  • Result

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Wednesday 08 December 2021, 10:13:40 AM.

    Your mark is now available on WebCMS3 or from your CSE account using

    9024 classrun -sturec

    You can obtain detailed feedback on your exam on WebCMS3 by clicking on the little arrow in the row labelled Exam as indicated below,

    or by using:

    9024 classrun -collect Exam 

    Unfortunately, I cannot reopen the Moodle exam for review since variations of these questions may be reused in another form in future exams. But if you did not pass the course and have further questions about your marks, then you can email me personally.

    Statistics:
    HD 12%
    DN 22%
    CR 27%
    PS 28%
    FL 11%

    Average: 65.4, which is +2.9 higher than the average WAM of the class. Congratulations! Kudos also to the following students for scoring 90 or higher:

    Jim Tang
    Wei Huang
    Grace Liu
    David Wang
    Jason Liu
    Yichun Shi
    Ankur Bhalotia

    Well done!

    Enjoy your term break, stay healthy and best of luck with your future studies.

    Michael

  • Final exam in 2 hours

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Monday 29 November 2021, 11:49:31 AM.

    A reminder that the final exam will commence in about two hours. You can find the exam by logging into Moodle:

    COMP9024 21T3

    Remember that you need to start the exam between 1:45pm and 1:50pm local time to get the full 135 minutes to complete the exam.

    Contact the COMP9024 staff via cs9024@cse.unsw.edu.au during the exam if you encounter any issues.

    Good luck everyone!

  • Assignment marked

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Wednesday 24 November 2021, 03:47:18 PM.

    You can now fetch your marked assignment, with some feedback, from WebCMS3 or by using

    9024 classrun -collect assn
    

    A word on the complexity of task 2: Finding and printing all maximal paths is challenging also from a complexity point of view, because this cannot be achieved by a polynomial algorithm. Graphs can have exponentially many (in the number of vertices) paths between two nodes. Auto-test #10 was checking this, with a total of 2 4 = 16 paths.

    Please see the bottom of your marked journal for details of how your assignment mark has been calculated. Should you have any further questions, please contact our marking hero Daria Schumm.

  • Early homework deadline

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Thursday 18 November 2021, 01:48:03 PM.

    Dear COMP9024 Student,

    This is just a reminder of the early due date for this week's homework: Tomorrow (Friday) at 5:00pm Sydney time. Please ensure to submit your program before then. Sample solutions to the week 10 problem set will be posted shortly after.

    Note also that there will be Friday consultation tomorrow as usual. In addition to this, I am offering an extra pre-exam consultation session on Friday week (26 November) at the usual time, 2pm.

  • Consultations / Help Labs Tomorrow

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Thursday 21 October 2021, 05:40:11 PM.

    Congratulations on finishing your mid-semester test!

    Please note that consultation and help labs are offered tomorrow (Friday) as usual despite the break, to give you a chance to catch up on any outstanding questions if you wish.

  • Midterm test in 1 hour

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Thursday 21 October 2021, 09:35:56 AM.

    A friendly reminder that the midterm test will commence in about one hour. You can find the test by logging into Moodle:

    Mid-term test

    Remember that you need to start the test between 10:30 and 10:35 local time to get the full 60 minutes to complete the test.

    Your test result will be available on Moodle one hour after the test has closed.

    Good luck everyone!

  • System downtime tomorrow (Wednesday)

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Tuesday 19 October 2021, 06:45:36 PM.

    Just a reminder that tomorrow afternoon, the CSE servers will be down for a few hours for a scheduled upgrade. This will likely also affect online access to our course material. If you were planning on studying for the midterm during that time, I suggest that you print or download the slides and homework solutions beforehand, which will allow you to access everything offline.

  • Week 3 assessment results

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Wednesday 06 October 2021, 02:06:34 PM.

    If you have made a submission to last week's problem set, your marked programs are now available on WebCMS.

    As indicated on the problem set, the auto-marker did check for un-free()'d memory, and a partial mark (0.5) was deducted when memory leaks were detected. Look for a paragraph like this in your marked journal to see the result of memory checking:

    Please ensure to follow good programming practice and always free dynamically allocated memory when it is no longer needed.

    Partial marks were awarded for solutions to "llsplit" that were not "in-place" (i.e. which created new nodes) but otherwise produced the correct result. In that case you can find the comment "Splitting not in-place" in your marked journal. If you had difficulties finding an algorithm that operates on the list itself, please have a look at the sample solution (other "in-place" solutions are possible, of course).

    I thought I should also mention that 3 students were found to having submitted near-identical solutions. The exercise was not an easy one, but getting a permanent entry on the UNSW plagiarism register as a consequence was probably not worth the risk for 2 marks. In the interest of everyone, please continue to play "fair" and always solve the homework on your own.

  • Daylight savings

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Monday 04 October 2021, 01:04:31 PM.

    Dear All,

    Just a friendly reminder that because of daylight savings the lecture tomorrow will essentially be an hour earlier, at 10am AEDT (instead of AEST).

    Michael

  • Prac assessment week 1: Results

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Friday 24 September 2021, 12:59:25 PM.

    If you have made a test submission for week 1, then the auto-testing result is now available on WebCMS3. By clicking on the little arrow indicated below you can inspect the result and see what test cases were used:

    Keep in mind that this was just a "mock" assessment and "Mark" does not count towards your mark for the weekly assessment component.

    Some common errors that I noticed, and hints on how to avoid them:

    • Programs did not compile without error or warning. A common warning was, "unused variable". It is bad programming practice to declare variables that are not used. The auto-tester is very strict in that it refuses to compile programs with even a single warning like this or any other.
      Solution: Always ensure that your programs compile on a CSE machine with all the options -Wall -Werror -std=c11 as required. A good way to check this is dryrun .
    • Programs failed to compile because of an incorrect use of header/implementation files. If your program includes a line of the form #include "filename.c" , then this is probably wrong. Only header files should be loaded into a client program. A good way to check this is dryrun .
    • The output had small syntax errors, e.g. "Enter a positive number" instead of "Enter a number". A good way to check this is dryrun .
    • If you did submit but cannot find your marked assignment, then this means that your submission was empty, that is, you submitted empty files or no files at all. I recommend to always double check that all the files you want to submit have been successfully submitted, and that they are not empty (i.e. the file size is > 0).

  • Help labs

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Thursday 16 September 2021, 02:36:33 PM.

    We have scheduled two online help labs on Fridays, one from 3pm to 4pm local time and the other one from 5pm to 6pm. Both will start tomorrow. The help labs are run by two of our tutors, Daria and Kamiyu. Attendance is entirely voluntary. The help lab is meant for you to get help with any issues that you experience with the weekly programming exercises or the programs from the lecture. To attend a help lab session, log into Moodle anytime between 3-4pm or 5-6pm, and follow the link "Student Help Lab".

    You can find the homework for this week under the menu item "Problem sets" on the WebCMS course page. Be reminded that this week's assessment if for practice only and won't count towards your final mark. But it is a very good way for you to familiarise yourself with how to write, test, and submit solutions to the programming exercises in this course.

  • Welcome to COMP9024: Data Structures and Algorithms

    Posted by Michael Thielscher Monday 13 September 2021, 12:30:53 PM.

    Dear COMP9024 Student,

    Welcome to this year's course.

    This is a reminder that our course will begin tomorrow (Tuesday) from 10am-12noon.

    Meanwhile check out the course webpage webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP9024/21T3/ . Have a look at the "Course Outline" to learn more about the contents of the course, the assessments and recommended textbooks.

    Please note that all components of our course, including lectures and consultations, will be online until week 6. We may switch to face to face teaching from week 7 depending on whether the university will be reopen by then. In any case, the course and all of its assessments, including the final exam, can be completed online.

    To attend the livestream lectures, please see "Livestream and recordings" on the course webpage on how to access these. I very much encourage you to attend the livestream every Tuesday and Thursday from 10am-12noon. You can use the chat function to ask questions -- and to give answers to short in-class exercises.

    All lectures will be recorded and made available on Echo360 afterwards.

    See you tomorrow,
    Michael


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