<aside> 💡 Disclaimer: The screenshot of my score is above. I’m literally on the line of the cut score. Study more than I did. I have this course marked as 8 days above but took one or two off in between. If you’re pushing to accelerate it’s probably a 5-6 day course.
WHAT I DID:
I watched Lusby’s webinars (Course Search → C952 Home Page → the section by section webinars, save popular ones for later) and did the Zybooks exercises alongside him, then also paused and watched the videos below for those sections, which were mainly things I didn’t understand. I treated this part like an open book test and only listened to Lusby/Youtube enough to complete the exercises. This course has a lot of information so I was trying to just get the groundwork set.
I took the PA after the webinars and failed. I knew I was going to fail but wanted to see what kind of questions were there. I’m not sure this was a good strategy, I didn’t feel the PA and OA were that similar.
After the PA I watched the webinars where he goes through the webinar questions. Then I watched the popular webinars for the sections that I did terrible on overall, which was mainly just computations. I don’t think the popular webinar helped much tbh because he goes back to the book but the PA videos are GOLD!
Study the vocabulary. The resource I used for this isn’t available anymore but I’d recommend first going through your PA and writing all the terms you’re not 100% sure of, even if you got the question right, and then just searching them in Zybooks and reading the definition and maybe clicking it and reading the paragraph it’s in. Then you can use the 57 page glossary (Course Chatter → Files at top right) to look for additional terms to study. There were plenty of terms on my OA that weren’t on my PA or gone over extensively in the webinars. There are also Quizlets linked within the course’s Home Page, I didn’t use them.
After this I went back to the PA report and answered the questions fill in the blank style without expanding the answers to judge my readiness. I do this for every course by the way and it’s way better than retaking it multiple choice style because you end up memorizing the answers.
Then I took the OA. I wrote some notes on common themes that popped up on my OA down at the bottom, maybe read that first before watching all the videos because some aren’t really necessary.
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| Key Sections 2.1 - 2.8 | SECTION 2 - COMPUTER ABSTRACT / TECH |
|---|---|
| Section 2.1 | MEMORIZING SIZES |
| Know - kilobyte | |
| Memory - megabyte | |
| Games - gigabyte | |
| To - terabyte | |
| Practice - petabyte | |
| Everything from - exabyte | |
| ZYbooks - zettabyte → yottabyte |
*** values start at 10^3 and the exponent += 3 for each new size (10^3, 10^6, 10^9, 10^12, cont..) and to get the base 10 number quickly it’s 1 concat [exponent number of 0’s] - so 10^9 is 1 concat 9 zeros, or 1,000,000,000 - one billion | | Section 2.5 | How are Microchips Made? Chip Manufacturing Main Memory vs. Secondary Storage Volatile vs. Non-Volatile Memory | | Section 2.6 | What is the CPU? CPU Components Fetch, Decode, Execute Clock Speed Understanding Performance CPU Time Computation | | Section 2.12 | Invention of Computer History of Computers Performance Measurement Amdahl’s Law Review Harvard Architecture | | Key Sections 3.1 - 3.7 | SECTION 3 - INSTRUCTIONS | | Section 3.2 | What’s Your Computer Doing? Assembly Language Programs (37:10 - 1:19:00) Data Operations (he’s using MIPS, LEVv8 and ARM use different syntax) Sequencing (also MIPS but theory applies) Registers and Memory | | Section 3.4 | Base 10 ←→ Binary (review from DM2) Two’s Complement Two’s Complement + Overflow | | Section 3.5, 3.6 | ‣ (for converting numbers across bases) Bit Manipulation Bit Masking ”need to understand how to add, subtract, load, store, shifting, overflow, and how to translate basic functions into higher level code” | | Key Sections 4.1 - 4.2, 4.6 | SECTION 4 - ARITHMETIC FOR COMPUTERS | | | Signed/Unsigned and Arithmetic Practice Parallelism Binary Shifts | | Key Sections 5.1 - 5.6 | SECTION 5 - THE PROCESSOR | | Section 5.1 | LEGv8 Datapath (first 10 minutes) Datapath Practice Identifying Dependencies | | Key Sections 6.1 - 6.8, 6.11 | SECTION 6 - Memory Hierarchy | | Section 6.7 | Cache and Registers Virtual Memory Playlist (short videos, watch up to video 8) | | Key Sections 7.1 - 7.5 | SECTION 7 - Parallel Processors | | Section 7.3 | Intro to Parallelism SISD, SIMD, MISD, MIMD | | | TEST PREP | | FINAL PA PREP | 1. Skim all the “Big Picture” blocks throughout the text. You can segment them by typing it into the Search from the text’s menu. Also skim all the Real Stuff, Fallacies & Pitfalls, and Concluding Remarks sections for each chapter — those are listed under the chapter sections. Post OA note - I had no history questions on my OA about specific machines but I was asked about the beginning technologies.
Watch Little Man Computer to summarize everything. (Idk how helpful this was but others swear by it)
Study the vocabulary using the study guide linked in the Course Chatter. Post OA - the instructors are not lying when they say the test is 80% vocab and 20% calculations! know the vocab, and not just what’s gone over in the webinars.
Take the PA. PA Questions #38 and #44 have errors, the instructors confirmed this. | | AFTER THE PA | 1. Watch the Pre-Assessment Question Videos. Don’t skip this, it tied so much together for me and is the only reason I passed.
Look over all the PA questions and answers and know all the terms, even if you got the question right.
This is where I stopped…but as you can see from my score screenshot above, more studying would have been good.
Things To Know (Writing This Post OA):