When I took this class many, many moons ago, the close equivalent of the "cache lab" was graded not on the number of cache misses but on the cache hit ratio. When I pointed the problem with this metric out to a TA he blew me off. So I turned in the original code plus a loop that read the same volatile value a few billion times. It took a long time for the cache simulator to grade, but they dutifully gave me a very high grade (something like 200%) on the lab :-)