General Thoughts (4 Viewers)

[Lindsay237]

What did you think about the exam. Heavily stimulus based and coding orientated I thought. Hardly any definition work....

 

[Howies]

I found it a lot harder than all the past papers I did. I struggled with a lot of it, particularly the Interrelationship between Software and Hardware topic.

 

[Shazer2]

Did fine in core I think, should get like 45-47/60 for that, but option topic I'll get like 7/20 maybe, and probably 15/20 for MC. All up around 70/100.

 

[pcyl]

Thought it was easy, it was well balanced test without too many algorithms. Hoping for Band 6.

 

[nickw444]

Humanities! So much blabbing about junk! Corresponded a lot with last year's IPT HSC exam

 

[xer0]

That was so fucking hard. Very different from all the past papers. What the fuck.
Everyone else in my class also found it very difficult.

 

[nickw444]

BTW, basically a free 5 marks with the robot question in the interrelationship option.

 

[Lindsay237]

The fact that I spent so much time on definitions and stuff like that really annoyed me. Like I said before the paper was primarily stimulus based. There were a few awkward mc questions that I just guessed. I don't think the paper was that horrid, although the paradigms option topic threw me off a bit.

 

[nickw444]

In my opinion was quite an easy paper, compared to some of the past papers where we've needed a lot of content to be regurgitated. Very happy. Confident in getting around 90/100

 

[Shazer2]

Yeah the robot one was good, but the other part was horrible.

 

[nickw444]

Which bit? Converting the floating point was simple, but the truth table was a bitch, but definitely do-able though.

 

[hjed]

I found the paper significantly easier than previous ones, I actually spent about 5mins looking to see if I had missed a page.

I felt there was a lot of drawing and not much algorithms at all.

Confident mid-90s

Only 2 multiple choice and one question in Section II I wasn't sure one.

What did everyone put for MC15 (I put B) MC16 (I put D)?
Hardest question was the three marker on specifications and assumptions. I wasn't clear exactly what it was asking.

 

[Shazer2]

Which bit? Converting the floating point was simple, but the truth table was a bitch, but definitely do-able though.

I never learnt how to convert from binary to decimal for floating point, just the one way. Truth table/circuit was hard. I didn't get either marks there. I'd say I'll get 1-2 marks for the binary multiplication question, maybe 1 for the floating point and probably none for truth table/circuit. At least there wasn't flip flops.

I found the paper significantly easier than previous ones, I actually spent about 5mins looking to see if I had missed a page.

I felt there was a lot of drawing and not much algorithms at all.

Confident mid-90s

Only 2 multiple choice and one question in Section II I wasn't sure one.

What did everyone put for MC15 (I put B) MC16 (I put D)?
Hardest question was the three marker on specifications and assumptions. I wasn't clear exactly what it was asking.

15 I put C. {} represents 0 or more when you go back through A is before the defined B. 16 I put D.

 

[hjed]

BTW, basically a free 5 marks with the robot question in the interrelationship option.

Yeah that and the truth table/circuit diagram were very easy.

 

[nickw444]

I played a game of redesign tripview on my software paper
MC15 i put B, which I was confident was true, and checked it like 4 times and compared with friends
MC16 I put B, binary search is whatever 2^n > number of values to search. where n is the number of passes required.

To make more sense of that,
2^4 = 16.
An array of 15 elements will take 4 passes.

Wait.. it asked for number of elements. Actually no, I think that's the same thing

 

[hjed]

With the floating point was the mantissa -127 that was the main bit I wasn't sure about. Now that I think about it it probably was -128 :/

 

[nickw444]

Floating point, the mantissa worked out to be (when adding the hidden bit back) 1.0000... to the base 2.
The exponent was 127. however you had to remove your bias of 127, which made it 0. So the answer was 1*2^0, which is -1 when you factor in the sign bit.

 

[hjed]

I played a game of redesign tripview on my software paper
MC15 i put B, which I was confident was true, and checked it like 4 times and compared with friends
MC16 I put B, binary search is whatever 2^n > number of values to search. where n is the number of passes required.

To make more sense of that,
2^4 = 16.
An array of 15 elements will take 4 passes.

Wait.. it asked for number of elements. Actually no, I think that's the same thing

^That's MC16, and I'm pretty sure B is correct for that.

MC16 is the acceptance testing one.

B really should have had brackets around (b[c]) but it appeared the closet, I just wanted to double check

 

[xer0]

What did everyone get for MC?
1C
2D
3B
4B
5B (pretty sure this is C, I put C then changed it)
6A
7A
8A
9A
10C
11B
12D
13B
14A
15B
16D
17B
18A
19B
20A

 

[hjed]

Floating point, the mantissa worked out to be (when adding the hidden bit back) 1.0000... to the base 2.
The exponent was 127. however you had to remove your bias of 127, which made it 0. So the answer was 1*2^0, which is -1 when you factor in the sign bit.

Dam, I knew I was doing something wrong with the mantissa, I did the bias the wrong way round
Still converted the modulus and sign right (and 1^-127 was still in the range) so hopefully get at least 1 for that