This page contains basic general information about the qualifying exam. For specific information about the next exam, follow this link.

The CSE qualifying exam will usually be offered sometime during the two weeks of each semester. There will be three questions on each of the four areas (see below). You will be permitted to omit one question from each area. The exam will be given in two 3-hour installments, separated by a short break. In each of the two sessions, students taking the full exam will answer questions from two of the four subject areas. Students taking only some of the subjects (i.e., for make-up) will have their time prorated.

If you have any questions please stop by Dr. Matthews's office (SWGN 3A57) or Dr. Fenner's office (SWGN 3A49).

Reading List

1. Algorithms (CSCE 750): Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein
   • Foundations: chapters 1-4, 5-9 recurrences, sorts and order statistics
   • Trees: chapters 12-13, search trees, red-black trees
   • Graph Algorithms: chapters 22-23
   • NP Completeness: chapter 34 +
   • Parallel Computing: refer to the lecture notes on Dr. Buell's web sites for 750. (Please note that some links on this page may no longer be valid due to changes in its directory structure.)
   For further reference see Dr. Buell's website (above) and Dr. Fenner's CSCE 750 website (http://www.cse.sc.edu/~fenner/csce750/index.html).

2. Architecture (CSCE 513): Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 3rd ed. Hennessey and Patterson, Morgan Kaufman, Chapters 1-5, 8.1-8.5, Appendix A
   • Fundamentals of Computer Design
   • Instruction sets
   • Instruction Level parallelism
   • Loop unrolling and static techniques
   • Memory Hierarchy design
   • Interconnection networks
   • Pipelining
   For further information see Dr. Cameron's CSCE 513 website (http://www.cse.sc.edu/~kcameron/csce513.html).

3. Compilers (CSCE 531): Compiler Construction: Priniples of Compiler Design by Aho, Sethi and Ullman, Addison-Wesley, Chapters 1-9
   • Lexical analysis
   • Syntax Analysis
   • Syntax-Directed Translation
   • Type Checking
   • Run-Time Environments
   • Intermediate Code Generation
   • Code Generation
   For further information see Dr. Fenner's CSCE 531 website

4. Theory (CSCE 551): Introduction to the Theory of Computation (1st or 2nd ed.) by M. Sipser, PWS, Chapters 1,3-5,7-8 (This replaces Introduction to Automata and Language Theory by Hopcroft, Motwani and Ullman) Note: the main difference between the two editions is that the 2nd edition contains solutions to selected exercises and problems.
   • Finite Automata, Regular Expressions, Properties of Regular Languages
   • Turing Machines, Decidability, Reductions
   • Time Complexity
   • Space Complexity
   For further information see Dr. Fenner's CSCE 551 website

A Past Exam

The Fall 2006 qualifying exam

This page was last updated Thursday January 17, 2008 at 12:50:27 EST.