OCR F453 Advanced Computing Theory (June 12th 2012)

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I've literally studied so much content as revision as we had an incompetent teacher all year so I've basically had to teach myself, using an online textbook and the jake wright notes i rewrote my own notes, it's taken ages. I'm worried that I haven't really done a past paper yet and the exam is soo close :/ Planning to pack out 3/4 past papers in quick succession, hopefully my knowledge makes up for my lack of practice. I'm sh*tting myself. Have to get a B atleast but I'm unsure of what my grade for my coursework will be.

Similar situation, my teacher left after doing 1 topic and the replacement had never taught the OCR computing before. He just pointed us to teachICT and read off the website and made it far more complex than it needed to be.

I still cringe when I remember his lesson on floating point binary. I like maths a lot so I was ok, but he made it stupidly convoluted.

Good luck everyone. Hope there's a good markscheme :smile:

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Reply 21

Lissy93

Original post by Bemz

I've literally studied so much content as revision as we had an incompetent teacher all year so I've basically had to teach myself

I totally know how you feel with the bad teacher, my teacher hasn't even looked at the sylabus and seems to know absolutley nothing about computers.

Also it doesn't help that there seems to be no good textbooks or resources availible for this course.

Here are links to the textbook and some notes and sites I have created here

Hopefully it will be usefull to someone
Good luck with the exam tomorrow :smile:

Reply 22

marland

What do you recon will come up ?? done a few past papers and they seem alright.

Reply 23

A.J10

Original post by marland

What do you recon will come up ?? done a few past papers and they seem alright.

There's always one about architecture, translation, language definition and binary. The rest are harder to be specific about

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Reply 24

Neon-Soldier32

I've been doing papers and on all of them I've gotten between 79 and 86, which I'm happy with. 80's what I'm aiming for.

I think there will be some stuff on; Scheduling, interrupts, memory management and maybe something on the boot file. A couple of pages for floating point binary, a page on UML, a page on databases. Hopefully some stuff on library routines. I hope stacks / queues don't come up.

Reply 25

A.J10

Stacks and queues are simple though, I'm dreading a big written question on databases or something.

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(edited 11 years ago)

Reply 26

marland

i need to get 80 ish marks in this exam, really dont see it happening tbh :s-smilie:

Reply 27

Nagillum

Original post by A.J10

Honestly, my knowledge of the subject isn't what's going to lower my marks so much as not knowing what the hell it is they want me to say :angry:

THIS!
It's stupid, having to learn exactly what the mark scheme wants you to say from past papers, it becomes more of just a memory test, than a "do you know the theory" test

Anyways, that Jake Wright's revision guide helped me out so much, that I'm feeling much better about tomorrow

Good luck to everyone! :smile:

Reply 28

tom95

Original post by Nagillum

You do not need to learn word for word the past paper answers because the mark scheme the exam board publishes for schools and students to use isn't the full mark scheme that examiners use when marking papers. OCR only publish the ideal answers and these are meant to be used to your focus answers.

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Reply 29

A.J10

Original post by tom95

Thank you for reminding me of that. Makes me feel a lot better about this exam.

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Reply 30

XO*

A little thing missing from Jake Wright's notes.
Reduced Instruction Set Computing //\\ Complex Instruction Set Computing.

RISC
-Usually faster due to smaller electrical circuit (less transistors)
- Less cycles required to do simple tasks
- Reduced instruction set
- Easier to program
- Example include mobile phones etc.

CISC
- Usually slower due to larger electrical circuit
- Multiple cycles required to carry out complex tasks
- Larger instruction set
- Used in general computers.

Reply 31

XO*

Original post by Aadil

Hey there, do we need to know as part of Data structures Lists - I know Stacks, Queues and trees come up and i went on the Specification and i couldnt find it mentioned anywhere. Thanks

Reply 32

tommyth94

How did everyone find it?

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Reply 33

fusionet24

Pretty Good all in all. I mean a few silly questions, some of the 4 markers were kinda 3 point responses.

They didn't have any on the Fetch Execute Decode Cycle but I'm pretty sure I got an B, Probably an A.

The binary part I got 5/32 as the answer.

Reply 34

Aadil

It was a good Paper i thought but i was disappointed they missed out content i was hoping for such as Searching and Sorting Algorithms since i find them good.
Grade Boundary predictions and what did everyone get for the BNF

Reply 35

marland

Original post by fusionet24

I also got 5/32 for the first one and 0110/0101 for the second (i think )

Reply 36

KS8

Original post by Aadil

For the BNF ones I did:

<CODE> ::= <CHAR>|<CHAR><CODE>

<COMMENT> ::= {}|{<CODE>}

<STATEMENT> ::= <CODE>|<COMMENT>

Something like that, I can't remember exactly what each one was/is called.

The rest of the paper was good I think, I think the database one was fairly different to prior to older papers and I wasn't expecting it.

Reply 37

AlexChurch

Original post by KS8

For the BNF ones I did:

<CODE> ::= <CHAR>|<CHAR><CODE>

<COMMENT> ::= {}|{<CODE>}

<STATEMENT> ::= <CODE>|<COMMENT>

Exactly what I did for the BNF, although I remember the statement part being worth 3 marks, which seemed odd to me.

Also got 5/32 for one part of the binary and put something about needing 5 bits for the mantissa on the last part on binary.

Overall I thought it was OK but also missed a couple questions, and got stumped by secondary key on the database Question.

Reply 38

KS8

Original post by AlexChurch

Yeah I agree, I saw it was worth 3 marks and read the question and information about 5 times to make sure if I needed more but I'm sure what we put is correct. The binary one I also got 5/32 but the others were more difficult. On the ones where you had to explain why it wouldn't work, you had to write each in pure binary and then say how long the mantissa was. Then reduce the mantissa to 4 bits as in the question format; so the value stored was not actually correct. Something along those lines I think.

Reply 39

XO*

I did very similar in the BNF, except I created 2 new definitions.
<CHARS> ::= <CHAR> | <CHAR> <CHARS>
And one for the curly brackets.

What did everyone put for the queue??

And for the addtional entity, did you guys do CUSTOMERS?