The class meets in Science Building Room B-141 from 1:30 to 2:45 on Mondays and Wednesdays.
Most office hour business can be handled by email. My address is vickery at qc dot edu. Be sure to include "CS-341" in the subject line of every message you send me, and be sure to include your name in the body of each message.
If you want to see me in person, I will be available in my office, Science Building room A-222, for half an hour after each class. If that time is not convenient for you, you may make an appointment to meet with me at another time.
There is one textbook for the course:
Murdocca, Miles J. and Heuring, Vincent P.
Principles of Computer Architecture
Prentice Hall, 2000
ISBN 0-201-43664-7
We will be covering material from chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and Appendices A and B. Reading assignments are on the Course Schedule web page.
There will be several homework assignments, but they will count only 1% of your course grade. That is, if there are ten homework assignments, each one will count 0.1% of your course average.
You must submit your own homework solutions, but you are free to work on the homework assignments with anyone you wish. The idea is to use the homework as a way to reinforce the material in the course, not as a test of your knowledge. I will record whether or not you hand in homeworks by the assigned due dates, but I will not evaluate your homework in any way. Instead, I will send the solutions to you by email after the assignment due date.
There will be a number of short quizzes based on the homework assignments, which will count 5% of your course grade. The purpose of these quizzes is primarily to motivate you to keep current in your coursework and to help prepare you for the exams. Your quiz average will be the average of your best three* quiz scores. If you take fewer than three quizzes, the missing ones will count as zeros in your quiz average. (* The exact number will depend on the number of quizzes actually given during the semester.)
There will be two midterm exams and a final exam. The two midterms will count 30% each, and the final will count 35%. Each exam will cover approximately 1/3 of the course (see the Course Schedule web page for dates), and the final exam will include some reveiw material from earlier parts of the course.
If your lowest exam score is ten points or less below your middle exam score, its weight will be reduced by 10% and the weights of the other two exams will be increased by 5% each.
The Blackboard system at online.qc.edu, which you used to access this web page, provides a Discussion Board that I encourage you to use to discuss issues related to this course. Feel free to post questions about the homework assignments there, for example. But if you offer help on the homework, help the requestor figure out how to answer the problem; don't just give the answer.
You can check the scores I have recorded for your homework, quizzes, and exams from the link above. To use this facility, you will need to enter a "code word." The code word is like a password, but it is not as secure as a real password because you must tell me what it is in order to set it up.
Never send a real password to anyone, not even a professor!
See the link to Homework Assignment 1 on the course schedule for details.
Grades become permanent and cannot be changed two weeks after they are posted, so be sure to monitor your grades regularly to be sure they are recorded correctly.