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Lecturer Response to myExperience Survey

Overall

Thanks for the great scores!

Free-form comments

Explain how seL4 does things like cache invalidation

You don't actually need cache management in your project, it's done transparently by the drivers we provide. This is actually too much abstraction for my taste, but too late to change now, we'll keep this in mind for 2023.

Course should be 12 UoC

I appreciate the sentiment, but experience has shown that using up two elective slots will prevent too many good students from taking the course. We just have to accept that it's a high-workload, high-reward course.

Spec vague, eg frame table vs M5

On consulting around we found there is some misleading wording in the M5 spec, fixed now.

Some tutors are giving out-of-date advice

That's unfortunate and it would help if it was pointed out to us earlier. Should not be a problem in '22, as all the tutors did the project in '21, and it hasn't changed (other than some fixups).

Response on the forum is slow

That's a feature, not a bug. Part of the design of the course is that, while giving plenty of feedback through regular milestone demos, we put much emphasis on students working things out by themselves and with their peers. The forum should be mostly for students ansering questions from other students. And the lab is really the place where you get answers.

M7 could use extra days

Maybe, but that would squeeze the rest even more. With 9-week terms we're at the limit of lossless compression, unfortunately. My recommendation is to use Flexweek to get ahead (or at least catch up).

Inconsistency in tutors' expectations/advice/spec.

Unfortunately that's not completely avoidable, but we'll do our best to make sure that tutors are on the same page, and will reiterate expectations to them.
In terms of discrepancy between spec and tutors' internal documentation, the latter is a refinement of the former. We deliberately do not completely specify the project. This is to force you to think about the design rather than just implement the spec, and is a core part of the learning objectives. The tutors are asked to not merely check that the design/implementation conforms to the spec, but that it is good and able to scale to the later milestones.

In-depth explanation of caps earlier?

There are a lot of dependencies between lectures, and we cannot do the security lecture until you're well into the project, so the high-level explanation in the intro has to do. But I note that this is the first time this particular issue has come up.

More detailed explanation of the "grace period".

UNSW policies about late penalties have tightened this year, so we need to change this anyway. We'll specify clearly.

Some indication of M7 mark breakdown.

We'll provide more transparency on the assessment scheme.

More preparation for paper reading.

We list literature for each lecture, but hardly anyone actually reads it (I know, the project is a lot of work already). But we specifically have the lecture preparation in the last week to show you how to approach a paper. Unfortunately not all students even prepare properly for that (by spending a few hours reading the sample paper).

More lecture content in the project.

Do you really want to make the project even bigger? I don't think that's realistic.

Final

Thanks for the feedback, and your participation in the course!

Gernot