Cisco Selection Procedure

CISCO SELECTION PROCEDURE 
    -------------------------
        WRITTEN TEST + ONE INTERVIEW

WRITTEN TEST
============
* Total Duration : 1 hour
* NO NEGATIVE MARKING

Total 3 sections
----------------
 * First section is COMPULSORY for both Electronics and Computer Science
   students.

 * Second Section is of Software.

 * Third is of Hardware.

 * I M P O R T A N T  :: ONLY  ONE  SECTION AMONG 2nd OR 3rd need to be
   answered like for you, you will give the answers of Section 2. 

 * 30 questions in each section
 
 * There was no bound of time for a particular section. You can
   devote any amount of time to any section but max. limit is 1 hr for
   the whole paper.

  DETAILS OF SECTIONS
  ------------------- 
  First Section : 1. Common to both cs and elec people.
                  2. total 30 questions and NO negative marking
                  3. Simple questions on digital logic design, 2's
                     complement, number representations, flipflops,
                     microprocessors(8085), Architecture[virtual memory
                     and small numerical like what will be the size of the 
                     memory if we have given the no. of address bits and
                     other necessary details].
                     One question of formal method.

  Second Section: 1. Software Section
                  2. total 30 questions and NO negative marking 
                  3. OS(3-4 qns), Compilers(2-3 qns. on basics),
                     maximum qns. were of C and Data Structures[trees,
                     preorder,post,inorder traversals,complexity of
                     search/sort, suitable data structures etc.]

  Third Section : devoted to hardware. i do not have any details as no
                  computer sc. student appeared for this section.

INTERVIEW
=========
Regarding CISCO interviews...... they asked about project and some C and
data structures and to some students some basics of networking and OS
questions..... there were 3 panels....... 2 panels for Software and 1 for
hardware....

Student has to give only one interview in any panel....There was no
separate HR interview.... interview was of generally 25-30 minutes
duration.... 2/3 persons in an interview panel....

Finally from IISc, in Software, they selected 9 people from Computer
Science and in hardware, 3 from CEDT(Electronics Design).

Interview Questions
-------------------
0. M.E. Project

1. If you are not having a sizeof operator in C, how will you get to know
   the size of an int ?

2. Write a macro to set the nth bit ?

3. Can you use a variable in a file using extern which is defined as
   both static and global in base file?

4. When we declare union in C, how is the size of union allocated in the
   memory?

5. What is the boundary problem in allocation of size of structures?

6. Data Structures:-
   
   a. Write a program to reverse a linked-list.
      Uma, before interview, practise it on a paper as many here couldn't
      write the code at the time of interview.

   b. Some trees question...what is balanced binary tree?..etc..

To Some students, one software panel asked about the courses they had done
here in IISc.

To some people, they have asked some OS and networking questions like 

OS Questions:
1. What is the difference between user and kernel space?
2. What is real time OS and how it's different from other OS?
3. signal and interrupt handling.

Networking Questions:-
1. Sliding window protocol.
2. TCP And IP differences.

This all I come to know from the 2 fellows, other written paper details
possibly questions, i will enquire tomorrow morning and send you.

IMPORTANT : I am sending you an OLD paper of CISCO as an attachment. My
            friends who have got thru cisco says that this year many
            questions were there from this paper. For example, in 1st
            section of the written test, the only question of formal
            method was same as asked in this old paper. 
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