Exams

Midterm Policies

You will have 70 minutes to complete the exam. You will be asked to check in with a specific staff member early in the exam room to receive a copy of the exam. You can read and fill out the cover page of the exam, but you should not look at the exam questions until you are told to begin.

• To Bring: student ID, pencil, eraser, ONE 8.5" x 11" double-sided sheet of handwritten notes (these must be written by hand on paper, not written on an electronic device and printed out), scientific calculator (optional)
• Provided: midterm reference sheet [PDF], printed exam with white space for work, time keeping
  • Countdown timer and exam clarifications will be projected in the lecture hall
• Not Allowed: books, printed notes, cell phone (silence and put away), watches, AI/AR glasses, hats, graphing calculator, or any other electronic device (unless specifically allowed by an approved accommodation)

Midterm Topics

• Memory, Data, and Addressing: pointers, endianness, data sizes, bitwise operators
• Number Representation: binary, integers, floating point
• x86-64 Topics: registers, instructions, control flow
• Procedures and the Stack: stack structure, calling conventions, register conventions, recursion
• Building an Executable: compiling, linking, loading

Anything from the beginning of the course, up to and including the discussion of building an executable in LC13 on Mon 4/27/26 is fair game. (multi-dimensional and multi-level arrays will not be covered.)

Some of the old exams may contain questions on topics that we did not cover before the midterm this quarter; you should skip over such questions.

Midterm Practice

Past Midterm Exam Database