Hi everyone!

Thank you for participating in COMP6991 this term, and congrats on finishing the final exam!

I believe this was our biggest term yet, and I hope you all had a lot of fun - and learnt at least one interesting thing to take-away to future courses, or prevent you from being paged at 3am in the morning!

We had a blast running the course with you - and a big thanks to our awesome tutors, who do a lot of work to keep the course running! If you're interested in helping the course in future terms, please keep an eye out for Andrew's tutor email at the end of term 2.

Update on LE marks

As it's our biggest term, it's also our biggest load of queries, and LE marks that need finalizing!

We are slowly working through these, there are only single digits for both ass1 and ass2!

Please allow some patience for email replies - but don't hesitate to bump the email if you haven't heard from us!

Thanks, Shrey, Zac, Tom and the COMP6991 team!

The exam is now finished (unless you have approved extra time).

As an important reminder:

Please do not discuss the exam for at least 24-hours after the conclusion. Recall that just because the exam is over for you, it does not mean that the exam is over for everyone.

Further submissions will no longer be accepted.

Congratulations everyone for completing COMP6991! I'd like to thank you all for choosing to take this course, and I hope to see you all around in future.

Thanks again everyone for an awesome term!

Cheers, Zac.

The exam is finishing in approximately 10 minutes (unless you have extra time).

As an important reminder:

Please do not discuss the exam for at least 24-hours after the conclusion. Recall that just because the exam is over for you, it does not mean that the exam is over for everyone.

Make sure you've submitted with give all questions you've attempted.

Submissions timestamped after the deadline will not be accepted.

Hi everyone!

Your final exam will be commencing in around three hours from now, at 14:00 Sydney time. I will release the exam at 13:55 to give everyone a chance to load the paper before the official starting time at 14:00. You may read the paper as you access it, but please do not commence working on the exam until the official start time at 14:00.

The exam will be accessible at https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs6991/current/exam/ at 13:55. The URL will 404 until 13:55.

The exam is three hours, and so will conclude at 17:00. If you have extra exam-time from your ELP, it has been applied (but will not show during submission).

Please do not submit any questions after the deadline. Run give as you go in order to avoid having to submit everything right near the end, when servers are sure to be slow.

If anything goes wrong for you during the exam, please send us an email at cs6991.exam@cse.unsw.edu.au. DO NOT POST ON THE COURSE FORUM DURING THE EXAM.

Please do not discuss the exam for at least 24-hours after the conclusion. Recall that just because the exam is over for you, it does not mean that the exam is over for everyone.

Now is a great time to make sure you will have adequate disk quota to complete your exam. Run the rquota command to check that you have a reasonable amount of space available.

Following this will be the exam conditions found at the top of the paper. You must read these either before or at the beginning of your exam. Of additional importance is the note about AI assistants.

Cheers! Zac.

Exam Preamble

Starting time: 2025-05-10 14:00:00

Finishing time: 2025-05-10 17:00:00

Time for the exam: 3 hours

This exam contains 7 questions, each of equal weight (10 marks each).

Total number of marks: 70

Total number of practical programming questions: 2 (20 marks)

Total number of theoretical programming questions: 5 (50 marks)

You should attempt all questions.

Exam Condition Summary

• This exam is “Open Book”
• Joint work is NOT permitted in this exam
• You are NOT permitted to communicate (email, phone, message, talk) with anyone during this exam, except for the COMP6991 staff via cs6991.exam@cse.unsw.edu.au
• The exam paper is confidential, sharing it during or after the exam is prohibited.
• You are NOT permitted to submit code that is not your own
• You may NOT ask for help from online sources.
• Even after you finish the exam, on the day of the exam, do NOT communicate your exam answers to anyone. Some students have extended time to complete the exam.
• Do NOT place your exam work in any location, including file sharing services such as Dropbox or GitHub, accessible to any other person.
• Your zpass should NOT be disclosed to any other person. If you have disclosed your zpass, you should change it immediately.
• The use of AI assistants is strictly prohibited in this exam. This includes services such as Github Copilot and OpenAI ChatGPT.

Deliberate violation of these exam conditions will be referred to Student Integrity Unit as serious misconduct, which may result in penalties up to and including a mark of 0 in COMP6991 and exclusion from UNSW.

• You are allowed to use any resources from the course during the exam.
• You are allowed to use small amounts of code (< 10 lines) of general-purpose code (not specific to the exam) obtained from a site such as Stack Overflow or other publicly available resources. You should attribute the source of this code clearly in an accompanying comment.

Exam submissions will be checked, both automatically and manually, for any occurrences of plagiarism.

By starting this exam, as a student of The University of New South Wales, you do solemnly and sincerely declare that you have not seen any part of this specific examination paper for the above course prior to attempting this exam, nor have any details of the exam's contents been communicated to you. In addition, you will not disclose to any University student any information contained in the abovementioned exam for a period of 24 hrs after the exam. Violation of this agreement is considered Academic Misconduct and penalties may apply.

For more information, read the UNSW Student Code, or contact the Course Account.

• This exam comes with starter files.
• You will be able to commence the exam and fetch the files once the exam commences.
• You may complete the exam questions using any platform you wish (VLab, VSCode, etc). You should ensure that the platform works correctly.
• You may submit your answers, using the give command provided below each question.
• You can use give to submit as many times as you wish. Only the last submission will be marked.
• Do NOT leave it to the deadline to submit your answers. Submit each question when you finish working on it.
• Please make sure that you submit all your answers at the conclusion of the exam - running the autotests does not automatically submit your code.
• Autotests are available for all practical questions to assist in your testing. You can use the command: 6991 autotest
• Passing autotests does not guarantee any marks. Remember to do your own testing!
• No marks are awarded for commenting - but you can leave comments for the marker to make your code more legible as needed

Language Restriction

• All practical programming questions must be answered entirely in Rust; you may not submit code in any other programming languages.
• You are not permitted to use third-party crates other than the standard library (std).

Fit to Sit

By sitting or submitting an assessment on the scheduled assessment date, a student is declaring that they are fit to do so and cannot later apply for Special Consideration.

If, during an exam a student feels unwell to the point that they cannot continue with the exam, they should take the following steps:

1. Stop working on the exam and take note of the time
2. Contact us immediately, using cs6991.exam@cse.unsw.edu.au, and advise us that you are unwell
3. Immediately submit a Special Consideration application saying that you felt ill during the exam and were unable to continue
4. If you were able to advise us of the illness during the assessment (as above), attach screenshots of this conversation to the Special Consideration application

Technical Issues

If you experience a technical issue, you should take the following steps:

1. If your issue is with the connection to CSE, please follow the following steps:
• If you are using VLab: Try exiting VLAB and reconnecting again - this may put you on a different server, which may improve your connection. If you are still experiencing problems, you can try changing how you connect to the CSE servers. Consider:
• By using VSCode (with SSH-FS extension): https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~learn/homecomputing/vscode/
• By using SSH: https://taggi.cse.unsw.edu.au/FAQ/Logging_In_With_SSH/
• If you are using VSCode remote-ssh: Try disconnecting VSCode, and then changing the URL from vscode.unsw.edu.au to vscode2.unsw.edu.au.
• If you are using SSH: Try disconnecting SSH and reconnecting again.
2. If things are still NOT working, take screenshots of as many of the following as possible:
• error messages
• screen not loading
• timestamped speed tests
• power outage maps
3. Contact should be made immediately to advise us of the issue at cs6991.exam@cse.unsw.edu.au
4. A Special Consideration application should be submitted immediately after the conclusion of the assessment, along with the appropriate screenshots.

Hi all! Some quick things...

Course website is back online

It seems there were some CSE server issues spanning Friday and Saturday! The site should be back online, but please let us know on the forum if you run into any issues - as it is hosted separately!

Week 8/9 Exercises Clarifications,

There was some confusion on the week 8/9 due date, as for a period of time, it showed last terms deadline for week 11 on the exercise page.

Sorry for the confusion! For any who submitted by the original date, we will not add late penalties.

Practice exam solutions

The practice exams page should no longer be panic'ing! A good reminder for good error handling as always ;)

Speaking of error handling - I came across this article on organising modular errors, and the different problems you face, a good read!

Longer email delays

As we are nearing the end of term, there are a larger than normal influx of emails coming in!

We are slowly getting through them all - if you feel your query is particularly time sensitive - please feel free to bump the email and let us know!

Thanks - have a great week!

Shrey

Hi all!

As mentioned previously, today's lecture (due to the public holiday) will be hosted live on YouTube at our usual scheduled time (18:00-20:00). There will be a live chat to interact with myself and each other, and we will finish off with our usual on-campus lecture tomorrow!

The live-stream URL for today: https://youtu.be/INE4ARJl5Xw

Thanks everyone, hope to see you there soon!

Zac

Hi Everyone,

Three quick topics:

1. In-Person help sessions started today, with a 12-2 session in Organ lab (this is near physics theatre, where our tuesday lecture is). There will be another f2f help session in Organ tomorrow, along with multiple online sessions. Times are listed on the timetable page.
2. We slightly ran out of time in today's lecture. I recommend taking 20 minutes to watch Zac's 22T3 lecture on Trait Objects which is the content we missed. His coverage of this topic runs from 1hr 20m to 1h 40m -- the last topic, iterators, was already covered today.
3. Just a reminder that next week is flex week: no workshops or lectures will run; but the help sessions will be on as normal!

Best,

~Tom (on behalf of cs6991)

Hi Everyone! Help Sessions will be starting this week, and run every week until Week 10. Note that they will likely not run on public holidays, though we'll keep you updated closer to those holidays.

• Tuesday 12pm to 2pm (Lorenzo and Sai): Online this week, face-to-face weeks 5-10
• Tuesday 4pm to 6pm (Dicko and Dominic): Online weeks 4-10
• Wednesday 12pm to 2pm (Lorenzo and Markus): Online this week, face-to-face weeks 5-10
• Wednesday 6pm to 8pm (Eric and Sabine): Online weeks 4-10
• Friday 2pm to 4pm (Lorenzo and Ningxiao): Online weeks 4-10

Online help sessions can be found in the course discord. The location of face-to-face help sessions will likely be the Help Session Room in K17, but this is TBC.

Thanks,

~Tom (on behalf of cs6991)

The Discord invite URL has been added to the timetable page now. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Welcome everyone to the sixth offering of COMP6991: Solving Modern Programming Problems with Rust! We are so glad to have you all here and sincerely hope you enjoy your time with us here in this course.

First off, some quick administrivia:

Course website

The course website (where you will find this announcement) can be found at https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs6991/25T1/. This will also link you to the course outline, the course timetable, and the course forum. This course does not use WebCMS3 nor Moodle (except to access Echo360 recordings).

Lectures

Our first lecture starts Monday week 1 (2025-02-17 18:00:00) -- that's today! The lectures are from 6:00pm - 8:00pm on both Mondays and Tuesdays each week (except week 6, and a long weekend in week 10). We plan to examine not just Rust code, but hopefully many different programming languages during the lectures and through this set the scope of our studies for COMP6991. I hope to see you there!

The lectures are hosted in-person at Ainsworth G03 (K-J17-G03) on Mondays and Physics Theatre (K-K14-19) on Tuesdays. The lectures will be recorded (into Echo360), Live-streaming seems to be a coin-flip term to term. Hopefully it works this term, but it's sadly not something I have control over.

22T3's lecture recordings are also available anytime here.

Workshops

Through your myUNSW enrollment, you will have selected a workshop class to join each week. It may have shown up as LAB or something similar on the class registration -- this is your workshop. The workshops are held weekly (except week 6) on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Please attend the one workshop that you are enrolled in.

The workshops are heavily practical and involve code design, programming in Rust, and finally reviewing code written and design decisions made, including considering what the experience may have been in other programming languages, etc.

I highly recommend all students to attend at-least your first couple of workshops -- I think you'll find them to be a fun, educational, and social experience, and hopefully you won't need further convincing after that point. If you make the effort to attend them and find this not to be the case, please tell us why and we'll do better!

We have one online workshop stream this term, which will be hosted on the Discord instant messaging / VoIP platform. The course discord URL can be found on the timetable page. Do note that the course Discord is not intended for general conversation -- the CSESoc Discord seems to already serve that purpose well.

Our team

Our teaching team this term consists of:

• Aaron Manning
• Aolin Xu
• Brian Li
• Brodie Hales
• Cam Mayhew
• Chris Yoo
• Daniel Chen
• Daniel Field
• Daniel Swords
• Dicko Evaldo
• Dominic Allas
• Eric Cai
• Fritz Rehde
• Hanyuan Li
• James Appleton
• Jonathan Lin
• Kaiqi Liang
• Kobi Beckett
• Lorenzo Grillo
• Markus Bian
• Matthew Kokolich
• Ningxiao Yang
• Ramid Khan
• Sai Nair
• Shrey Somaiya
• Tom Kunc
• Wisesa Resosudarmo
• Xavier Carey

Wow, so many tutors this term!! We are extremely lucky to have such a talented and friendly teaching team. Please show your respect at all times to our course staff, who I know for certain are all incredibly excited to be teaching this course for you all!

Weekly exercises

On the course website you will find your first set of weekly exercises has already been released! The due date is Week 2 Wednesday, and this due date structure (week n + 1 Wednesday) will follow similarly for later weekly exercises. These (usually) provide autotests, and are submitted with 6991 give-crate. Weekly exercises will be released weeks 1-5,7-9 (inclusive), bringing a total of 8 weekly sets.

Note that we've also provided some week 0 exercises that are not assessed, and solely exist to help you make sure your Rust toolchain (whether working on CSE or at home) is working correctly, and get you started on some fundamentals.

Blog posts

In order to help recoup any lost marks from weekly exercises, we are offering "blog posts" for make-up marks! We hope they are a fun and rewarding activity, and you can read more about them here.

Difficulty

We would like to formally recognise that COMP6991 is a challenging course, with a relatively high workload. This will be spoken to further in the lectures, but if you are unsure whether COMP6991 is right for you, please send us an email to the course email address (see course outline).

--

Welcome to the course everyone :)

Zac