COMP9024 Notices

Your Feedback

Posted by Michael Thielscher Tuesday 20 December 2022, 04:36:40 PM.

Dear COMP9024 Student,

Before the start of the holidays, I want to thank everyone for your detailed feedback on myExperience. I was very happy to see a final response rate of 75% and that almost everyone (96.4% of respondents, to be precise) was satisfied with our course. I have read every comment, and I assure you that I will consider all your suggestions for further improvement at the next offering of this course.

Specifically positive comments centred around the fact that the in-person class allowed many of you to connect to each other. I hope that in the near future everyone is able to come back on campus. As one student remarked, "collaborations and friends are important" -- while this course does not have group projects, your future courses will. In this context, I'd like to stress that we always encourage you to study together. This is true even when we say that assessable components of a course, such as weekly quizzes and assignments, must be completed individually. Just think of the analogy to exams: We very much like you to form study groups to help each other understand the course contents throughout the term and especially in the lead-up to an exam, but then the exams themselves of course need to be done individually.

In terms of suggestions what could be improved, besides the most common answer ("nothing!") there were suggestions to reduce the contents ("a little bit hard", "too difficult", "spend more time with C in the first few weeks") as well as to extend it ("higher level of complexity", "proof of correctness for algorithms", "more advanced algorithms"). Which, all considered, seems to indicate that the level of difficulty for this course has been about right. This notwithstanding, as indicated I will consider all all your suggestions to improve COMP9024 even further.

Have a good seasonal break everyone,

Michael

Results

Posted by Michael Thielscher Tuesday 13 December 2022, 01:24:21 PM.

Your mark is now available through cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~give/Student/sturec.php or from your CSE account using

9024 classrun -sturec

You can obtain a detailed summary of your exam marks on cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~give/Student/sturec.php → Assignments → Search for Assignments → Exam

or by using:

9024 classrun -collect Exam

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

The university has a policy to disallow any adjustments to near-misses of higher grades, and they use statistical methods to check for compliance. In a large class such as ours, it is unfortunately always the case that some of you will have been missing out on a higher grade by just 1 mark, in which case I apologise for what is simply bad luck, but please note that all open questions were marked individually and under the same marking criteria for everyone, and then we are not allowed to make individual adjustments.

Kudos to the following students for scoring 90 or higher:

Guokai Chen
Wentao Zhang
Tsz Lik Wong
Yanglin Chen
Yiyang Feng
Ho Yin Kwong
Runxi Liu
Leyin Qian
Sijia Xu
Weixian Qian
Yiping Tang
Hari Chinta
Chin Pok Leung
Dennie Mok

Well done, and congratulations to everyone else who passed and obtained a good result!

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

Michael

I'd like to add that six students have been reported for exam misconduct in form of communicating/exchanging answers. COMP9024 is a challenging course but this cannot be an excuse for cheating, which will be strictly dealt with in the interest of everyone else who put in their best effort.

Final Exam: Answer template for question 11(d)

Posted by Michael Thielscher Monday 05 December 2022, 02:49:26 PM.

We noticed that in some cases, the answer template for question 11(d) asks for a different rotation than the question.

We will count both answers as correct.

Assignment marks

Posted by Michael Thielscher Wednesday 30 November 2022, 03:01:18 PM.

You can now fetch your marked assignment, with some feedback, either by logging into cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~give/Student/sturec.php , or by using

9024 classrun -collect assn

If you are curious about the test cases that were used for evaluating your program, you can now find these under Assignment -> FAQ. Kudos to the 24 students who managed to solve all 20 of them!

If you have any further question about your assignment mark, please contact the tutor who marked your assignment; you can find that information at the very bottom of your journal (line starting with "Marked by").

Mid-session test on Wednesday

Posted by Michael Thielscher Monday 17 October 2022, 03:35:23 PM.

You can now find a link to the mid-session test on Moodle, under the heading Assessment). Or access the test directly through this link:

Mid-Session Test - Wednesday 19 October

The test will open on Wednesday at 4:30pm and automatically close 1 hour after you have started it or at 5:35pm the latest (even if you have started after 4:35pm).

Please be reminded that the assessment of the week 5 problem set is due tomorrow (at 5pm as usual), that is, before the mid-session test on Wednesday, so that we can provide sample solutions before Wednesday.

Week 3 programs marked

Posted by Michael Thielscher Friday 07 October 2022, 03:45:41 PM.

If you have made a submission to last week's problem set, your marked programs are now available on WebCMS. You can also see which test cases were used to assess your program.

As indicated on the problem set, the auto-marker also checked for un-free()'d memory, and a partial mark (0.5) was deducted for memory leaks. Look for a paragraph like the below 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 "lldivide" that were not "in-place" (i.e. which created new nodes) but otherwise produced the correct result. 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 9 students were found to having submitted near-identical solutions. The exercise was not an easy one, but as a result, students have now earned a permanent entry on the UNSW plagiarism register, and I don't think that that was worth the risk for 2 marks. In the interest of everyone, please continue to "play fair" and write your own programs.

Prac assessment week 1

Posted by Michael Thielscher Monday 26 September 2022, 02:00:35 PM.

If you have made a test submission for week 1, then your auto-testing result is now available on WebCMS3.

Click on

to get to the page with an overview of your marks, then click on the little arrow indicated below, and you can inspect the result and see what test cases were used:

Keep in mind that this was just a "mock" assessment and 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 when the options -Wall -Werror were used. A common error was, "unused variable". It is generally considered 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 .
• 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).

New lecture theatre on Wednesdays: Keith Burrows Theatre

Posted by Michael Thielscher Wednesday 14 September 2022, 11:17:00 AM.

Thanks everyone who answered the poll on attending the face-to-face lectures.

Please note that the room for the lectures on Wednesdays has changed: We will now be in Keith Burrows Theatre (Building K-J14) . The time remains the same: 4pm-6pm. The new theatre provides ample space for everyone.

Please make sure to come to the new room today.

See you there,
Michael

Attending lectures in person

Posted by Michael Schofield Monday 12 September 2022, 11:38:17 AM.

We have a large large student cohort this term and need to make sure we have room for everyone who would like to attend lectures on campus.

Even if you enrolled in the on-line steam for this course we would like to know your preference for attending lectures.

Please complete this poll so that we can make sure we have the space necessary for everyone to attend lectures.

https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP9024/22T3/acti...

Welcome to COMP9024: Data Structures and Algorithms

Posted by Michael Thielscher Friday 09 September 2022, 03:14:57 PM.

Dear COMP9024 Student,

Welcome to this year's course.

This is a reminder that our course will begin next week on Wednesday (September 14) from 4-6pm in Webster Theatre B (Building G15).

Meanwhile check out the course webpage webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP9024/22T3/ . 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 lectures will be recorded with recordings becoming available 1-2hrs after the lecture on UNSW's Echo360 system (see the link on Moodle). Note also that the entire course, including of all its assessments, can be completed online.

See you on Wednesday,
Michael