1999 Session 2 Final Exam

General Rules

• This is a 24h take-home exam.
• The exam runs from 17:00 on Thursday, 11 November 1999 to 17:10 on Fri 12 November 1999
• The basic exam question is available now, but the papers you are asked to analyse will be made available only at 17:00 on Thursday, 11 November 1999.
• The papers will be available in hardcopy from my office and electronically via this WWW page.
• The total exam is worth 35 marks.
• You will lose 3.5 marks for each hour, or part thereof, your submission is late.
• You are not to get any help from anyone on the exam. You should not talk to anyone else about the exam from the time you receive the full details until you submit your solution.
• You must submit your solution in hardcopy. It must be accompanied by the signed certification of sole authorship. You will not receive any marks without that certification.
• For the purpose of proving on-time submission you may submit an electronic copy, in plain ASCII, PostScript or (if you really have to) Microsoft Word format. Conditions for electronic submission:
  • You still have to submit your solution in hardcopy, and the hardcopy solution must be accompanied by the signed certificate. However, the hardcopy may be submitted later (not later than Monday, 15/11/99).
  • The electronic copy, when printed in a standard way, must look identically to your submitted hardcopy, so I can easily verify that they are identical.
  • The electronic copy must be submitted via the ``give'' system, mark name ``exam''.

Specifics

• Paper 1   Sample report 
• Paper 2   Sample report 
• Paper 3   Sample report 

You are to read, understand, and critically assess the papers. Questions you may want to ask yourself for each of the papers:

• What problem is it trying to address
• How well does it address the issue
• How does it relate to other work? Does it reference relevant other work (as far as you can tell), does it do the other work justice?
• How technically sound is it? Does their argumentation, the presented data convince you? Should they have been looking at other issues?
• How good are the results?
• How good/deep is their analysis?
• How easy would it be to reproduce their results?
• How general are their results? Can they be applied to other systems? Did we learn some general truth?
These are only hints, I am not asking you to explicitly answer all these for each paper. However, you may find those questions helpful in critically analysing the papers. Imagine you are a reviewer for a conference to which the papers have been submitted, and you are to judge their contribution to the field.

Note that all papers are in fact published (and therefore cannot be all that bad :-)

What to submit

You are to submit a report which summarises for each paper the basic ideas behind their work. You are to give a critique of the technical merits, achievements and shortcomings (if any). The papers are not directly related, so you don't have to compare them (although feel free to do a comparative analysis if you think it makes sense).

I am intentionally not specifying a length limit. However, I strongly encourage you to be concise. Lengthy submissions will almost certainly be unfocussed and waffly. I cannot imagine a decent job in excess of 3000 words, and would imagine that a very good submission would stay well below 2000 words total. If your report gets longer than this you should step back and try to focus.

What I will be looking for

You will be marked on the level of understanding and critical analysis portrayed in you submission. All relative to what can be reasonably expected from you (I know that none of you have a PhD in OS yet :-)

Sample reports 

The sample reports provided above were produced in ``real time'' by one of the students taking the exam. They are of exceptional quality, much better than what I hoped to get. I wish all reviewing for international conferences was of such a standard.

Keep this in mind when reading them, and don't get discouraged by them.

---

Just in case you were wondering: last year's exam was totally different. [an error occurred while processing this directive]   Last modified: 1999-11-09.