Lab credit and the course test are completely independent.
Each lab will hold one assignment (possibly broken down into several steps). The assignments are incremental, which means that your code and knowledge obtained when solving one assignment may be required for the subsequent assignment(s). The individual assignments lead to the final home assignment. To receive credit for the labs, you need to complete all 6 individual assignments from the labs and successfully present the final (7th) home assignment to your lab teacher.
Under regular circumstances, the individual lab assignments are solved during the labs. If one does not manage to complete the assignment during the labs or misses the class altogether, the assignment is expected to be finished at home. In any case, the assignments have to be uploaded to ReCodEx before a given deadline (check the page of your labs for details).
The final (7th) home assignment has to be presented in person to your lab teacher. Individual labs will have individual terms and conditions for presentations (announced by the lab teacher before the summer examination period). The primary criterium for the credit is that your solution is fully functional. The secondary criterium is the code quality. Solutions that severely violate good coding practices will not be accepted.
The credit details regarding deadlines, submission acceptance, or any additional requirements are specified individually by lab teachers.
Please, make yourself acquainted with the authors' ethical guidelines. It might prevent future misunderstandings regarding the authorship of your lab assignments. Severe violations of these guidelines will not be tolerated.
The exam will be in a form of a test, which is taken in labs (at a PC) and evaluated by a computer using Quixam application. A few examples of testing questions will be presented in the last lecture. The questions will target mainly your understanding, not your memorized knowledge. In other words, you do not need to remember exactly all the constants or precise names of MIPS instructions; however, you need to understand the concepts even to solve simple computational/algorithmic assignments (e.g., put given instructions in the right order or translate a virtual address into a physical address).
Exam dates will be announced before the summer exam period in SIS where you need to enroll for them. Exam terms will be added if necessary, but do not rely on having any terms in September. Credit is not required for taking the exam; however, you need both the credit and pass the exam to complete the course.
The grading is:
We have decided to give the students one special dispensation during the exam. A student may decide to leave the test after the testing session was started. However, the exam term would be forfeited (the same way as if the student would not arrive without a due excuse) and each student can do this at most once. This way you can avoid receiving a bad mark in case you underestimate the preparation and you realize this during the test. On the other hand, once the test is graded, the received mark will be always written in the SIS.
The test results may be consulted after the test, but as a general policy, we will not give you the exact correct answers nor corroborate your assumptions about correct answers. However, we will gladly clarify any principles and explicit knowledge that were used in particular questions.
Creating new sets of questions is quite time-consuming and we would like to prevent the students from studying the answers to particular questions instead of studying the course itself. Therefore, publishing test questions is strictly prohibited!
It might be also worth reading our reasons for having the exam in this format, which is summarized on the student's rebuttal page.