UCR CS 61: Computer Organization & Assembly Language

Fall, 2004

Overview

Basic information

Lecture schedule

Lab schedule

General course policies

• Material covered: As mentioned above, the course consists of all material covered in lectures, labs, assigned reading, programming assignments, etc. While there is considerable overlap among these elements, they are to be considered separate and individually essential building blocks of your introduction to Machine Organization and Assembly Language Programming.



• Collaboration policy
  In general, we have found that one of the best predictors of success in these courses is participation in a study group of some kind. We encourage you to work together and learn from each other in as many ways as possible, and we will provide any assistance we can to make this happen.
  However, we also have to assess each student individually, so there are very explicit boundaries to collaboration:
  • Midterm, final, quizzes, lab practical -- Obviously no collaboration
  • In-lecture exercises -- Dependent on instructor instructions for particular exercise.
  • Homeworks -- Collaboration is strongly ENCOURAGED, although of course, you should still submit your own solutions. In the past, many questions on the midterm and final exams have been taken directly from homeworks.
  • In-lab exercises -- Collaboration is strongly ENCOURAGED. If you complete an exercise, feel free to help others -- teaching enhances your own learning.
  • Home programming assignments -- Collaboration is strictly FORBIDDEN. Programs must represent YOUR OWN original work. Sharing code or team-coding are not allowed. Copying code from ANY source (any book, current or past students, past solutions, the web, etc.) is not allowed.
    Cooperation to the extent of helping to debug, or discussing the general approach to solving the problem is encouraged, but should never involve communicating code or even pseudo-code or explicit algorithms. Your code must be unique -- if it is not, we will find out, and will treat it as a case of flagrant academic dishonesty.
  
  
• Academic dishonesty: cheating of any sort is severely punished.
  Report cheating (anonymously if you wish) at: https://www.cs.ucr.edu/cheating/.
  We regularly catch several cases of copying in the course EVERY QUARTER, with severe penalties given.
  Other forms of cheating, such as lying to an instructor in order to be allowed to make up a test, or copying on a quiz, etc., are all treated with the same severity.
  PLEASE, don't risk it!! We hate failing students!!



• Regrade policy: regrade requests must be submitted in writing and within one week of the posting of the relevant grades. Likewise, grade-database errors should be pointed out within one week of posting.



• Communicating with the instructors and TAs: when emailing your instructors or TAs, please remember that many students have the same name, and your instructor may be teaching other courses too. So please give your full name and list the course you are referring to, and preferably include your student ID number. You should use your UCR email account (remember that UCR sends many official notices now only by email). Please try to be polite and professional, and use reasonable grammar and formatting.



• Assignments and lab reports: All turned-in assignments will be turned in electronically. Each file should be headed with your name, student id, email, lab & lecture section numbers.
  Also, you must include a section explaining the design, structure, etc of your program and how it works. Comments in source code are important, but they are not a replacement for an explanatory section. Please remember that successfully writing a computer program that compiles and runs correctly is not something anyone can do in just a few minutes, even when it looks easy. Debugging typically takes three times longer than figuring out how to write your program. So don't leave your programming assignments to the last minute!



• Reading: Read the current book sections before coming to lecture, and attend all lectures in their entirety. To encourage these important college study habits, we may give a few simple pop quizzes during the quarter, at any time during lecture.

Lab guidelines

• Students are required to stay the full three hours of lab session every week. You'll have Lab exercises, discussions, and possibly practical exams. Work ahead or on extra course-related material if you finish early.
• During lab discussion time, students should not use the computers. Ideally, students would move their chairs to the whiteboard area.
• Prepare for lab before arriving.
• To reduce disruptions and provide for the best educational environment, all persons in lab during scheduled lab time should be formally registered in that section. In general, no swapping sections and no unregistered people in the lab are allowed, even if there are extra computers.

Electronic assignment turn-in

Anonymously report suspected cheating

Additional Resources

• LC-3 manual (pdf)
• Summary of LC-3 instruction set
• LC-3 subroutines and linking
• LC-3 Pseudo-ops
• Boolean algebra


• Online FAQ
• UCR CS department's Cool Links and Resources For Students page.