Last changed: March 9, 2022 11:35 AM
VCE Applied Computing Notes by Mark Kelly
VCAA Informatics Exam Post Mortem2016Now in living colour - and with an exciting new SECTION C ! |
Post Mortem Notes This is not a VCAA publication.
I do not speak for the VCAA, the IT examiners, or exam markers. I was not involved in the writing or marking of this examination. Extracts from exams are all Copyright © VCAA, and are used with permission. Use these post mortems at your own risk. I reserve the right to change my mind completely, at short notice, about anything I've said here. Suggestions, discussions and corrections are welcome. Questions look like this. |
Other VCE IT Exam Post Mortems to enjoy IPM / ITA / Informatics / Data Analytics - 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2023
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The Post Mortem Awards |
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The infamous SCHMACKOS award for questions that are a complete dog's breakfast. |
The Questions That Make You Sick As A Dog Award |
The Stamp of Approval for questions I like. |
The exciting Illiteracy Award for crimes against the English language. |
New for 2016 - the Naughty Step Award, for when the examiners breaks their own rules, and are sent to think about what they have done. |
COMPUTING: INFORMATICSWritten examinationFriday 11 November 2016 Reading time: 11.45 pm to 12:00 noon (15 minutes) Writing time: 12:00 noon to 2:00 pm (2 hours)
Materials supplied
Instructions
At the end of the examination
Students are NOT permitted to bring mobile phones and/or any other unauthorised electronic devices into the examination room. |
SECTION B - short answer questionsInstructions for Section B |
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Question 1 (4 marks) Marco is the owner of a recently opened shoe store. He has been storing sales records in a flat file database. Each record contains the following fields: customer ID, customer name, address, contact number, purchase price, date sold and the unique item code for each pair of shoes. a. State two advantages of moving the sales data to a relational database. 2 marks
b.
Marco has started to create the entity-relationship diagram below for his data.
OK. I have problems with this. 1. The question's case study says that "Customers sometimes buy more than one pair of shoes." This guarantees at least the cardinality that ONE customer can buy MANY shoes. Hence my reluctant solution, which is actually ridiculous. In The Real World™, one type of shoe must obviously be bought by more than one person - unless it was a particularly unsuccessful range of shoes that only ever sold a single pair, like this...
So it should actually be a M:N (many to many) relationship. But let's not let mere trifles like practices in The Real World™ and common sense get in the way of an Informatics exam question. Otherwise we'd be here all month. 2. What on earth is "Date sold" doing as an attribute of the SHOE entity? That would mean that an instance of an entire shoe variety could only be sold once - ever. It's not like "Date invented" which applies to every member of the SHOE class. "Date Sold" relates to a transaction, not the SHOE entity. The positioning of 'Date Sold' in this ERD is obviously wrong and icky. Newsflash. Research in The Real World (TM) reveals Chen relationships CAN have attributes, so the exam's ERD (or the official VCAA rules for Chen ERDs) is flawed.
See http://www.conceptdraw.com/How-To-Guide/erd-how-to-draw-er-diagrams Exam markers should accept either 1:M or M:N for this question. 3. The term 'cardinality' does not appear in the study design or 'Advice for Teachers'. It does appear in the VCAA document on Entity-relationship (ER) conventions'. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find relevant canonical course information in the growing number of VCAA's Informatics documents that are stored in disparate places (VCAA site, Advice for Teachers site) and formats (docx, HTML, PDF). If only VCAA could take their own advice and gather their resources into a single, searchable database of relevant course information so teachers and students would not have to load a multitude several documents to check whether something is assessable or not. This site tries to do this, but it's not my job.
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Question 2 (3 marks) A large number of paper survey forms have been completed and now the data must be entered into a database. It is important that the data is entered accurately. a. State one manual technique that could be used to ensure data entry is as accurate as possible. 1 mark Enter the data, then read it over and compare it with the original data on paper. b. Describe an electronic validation check that could be used to identify possible errors as data is entered. 2 marks
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Question 3 (5 marks) Janice wants to create a web page to inform the public about her amateur theatre group's new play. a. Outline two techniques Janice could use to generate alternative design ideas for her web page. 2 marks
There are many other possibilities, but let's rule out mushrooms, OK? b. Suggest a criterion Janice could use to evaluate which of her design ideas she should choose.
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B4 | Question 4 (2 marks) A student has found an online report containing data he wishes to use for a school project. He viewed and downloaded the report on 14 June 2016 from <http://www.endangered.vic.gov.au/report>. The report was written by M van Olst and entitled ‘The plight of the pygmy possum'. It was first published in 2014. Using your preferred method of referencing and the information provided, write the reference the student would put in his reference list. Referencing method -Harvard. van Olst, M 2014. The plight of the pygmy possum, accessed 14 June 2016. <http://www.endangered.vic.gov.au/report>. Referencing method -American Psychological Association (APA). van Olst, M (2014). The plight of the pygmy possum. Retrived from http://www.endangered.vic.gov.au/report. Referencing method -Chicago. van Olst, M. "The plight of the pygmy possum." endangered.vic.gov.au. http://www.endangered.vic.gov.au/report (accessed June 14, 2016) Referencing method -Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [1] M. van Olst (2014).The plight of the pygmy possum [Online] Available: http://www.endangered.vic.gov.au/report Hang on a minute! The question did not specify that the 'preferred method of referencing' had to be one of the four in the study design. LOOPHOLE! But seriously, folks, this was far from easy for the average student. Getting each comma, italic (have you ever tried to handwrite in italics?), and quotation mark right is a big ask - especially for a website reference, which is arguably trickier than a reference to a book. I hope the markers are allowed a fair amount of latitude when awarding marks. Nevertheless, I predict the state average will be about 0.5 / 2 or less. |
B5 | Question 5 (7 marks)
a. Identity three features of this design that do not follow appropriate conventions. 3 marks
This was confusing. It was hard to see whether the slanted writing was supposed to appear as it is shown, or whether it was meant to A rather messy and awkward presentation for a question, I thought. Question C9 did it a little better.
b. Use the grid below to redesign the home page and apply appropriate conventions. 4 marks I couldn't be bothered drawing and scanning it. Move the logo to the top. |
B6 | Question 6 (5 marks) An organisation stores its client data on a file server that is kept in a back office. Each night, a backup tape is made. Recently, a staff member became aware that, instead of being taken off site, the backup tape was simply left on a cabinet in the back office where the file server is. The staff member reports this to the head of the organisation. Backups again? The examiners are back to their backup fixation of previous years.
a. Outline two possible consequences for the organisation if the head of the organisation does not take any action. 2 marks
b. Recommend an action that the head of the organisation should take to remedy the situation. 1 mark Assign a person to take the backup tape offsite at the end of each day. Duhh. c. Having been alerted to the careless information management practices within the organisation, the head of the organisation decides to investigate further. She discovers that the organisation has no disaster recovery plan. The organisation has no preparation for evacuating the building, so people could die in a fire or other disaster. |
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Question 7 (4 marks) The internet provides access to many hours of video footage on almost any subject. It is easy to download a video and then include it in a website or other online solution. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 requires users of other people's intellectual property to seek permission to use, adapt, or broadcast the IP. It applies to any creative work - printed or electronic - whether or not it has been labelled as copyrighted. (8 ruled lines were provided for the answer.) |
Section B overall - The ERD question was a bit of a dog - rather unrealistic, and it violated 3NF. It will be interesting to see how strict markers will be on the referencing question: will a misplaced comma lose big marks? B5 - the website design question - was a bit confusing. Backups are big in the new exam - A15, A16, A17, A18, A20 and B6 all involve backups for a total of 9 marks so far.
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Case studyInsert for Section C - Case study InformUs
END OF INSERT In case you were interested, this data is genuine and the actual report can be downloaded. |
Instructions for Section C Please remove from the centre of this book during reading time. Use the case study provided in the insert to answer the questions in this section. Answers must apply to the case study. Answer all questions in the spaces provided. |
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Question 1 (6 marks) There is a lot to be done to prepare his report and Bill has a deadline to meet. He decides to prepare a plan to help him manage this project. He works out the main tasks and estimates how long each will take: Using the task list above, construct a Gantt chart for Bill on the grid below. Show the durations and the dependencies, and take into account the following: Click the thumbnail above to see the Gantt full-sized. Download the GanttProject source file. Straightforward enough. It was good to see the clear explanation of which tasks could be concurrent. But, as Jack from Yesodie noticed, something fishy is going on. With most corporate Gantts, the default setting is that Saturdays and Sundays are non-work days, and the question pointed out that Bill does not work on weekends. So at first I went ahead and set the duration of task B to 7 days - as one would. The problem is that noone said that the telemarketers could not reply to the survey on weekends, so I had a problem: most tasks could not use weekends, but one did. That made the critical path 2 days longer than the space allowed by the examiners in their empty Gantt. I consulted the GanttProject forum, and found that individual tasks could not be set to different weekend rules. Since I could not find a way to set a single task as weekend-enabled, I had to fudge it by setting the duration of task B to five days - a messy, icky solution. Doing the chart on the exam paper, it would have been easy to count the days and make different tasks follow different rules. Using software made a royal mess out of it. I don't know what the moral of this story is. I've been pondering it and decided that task B is not actually a task and should not be represented as a task. I've decided that if this was a deliberate inclusion, it's a dirty and unfair trick. Tip: when you get a Gantt in future exams, I suggest you lightly colour in the weekends with a pencil or highlighter so you don't forget to treat them with care.
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Question 2 (2 marks) Data is collected during tasks B and D. Task B - because it is original data generated by the researcher. The data in task D has been generated by some other entity. Remember that simply finding data does not make it your data, and does not make it primary. "Explain why" - why what? Explain why it is primary data, why primary data was used, why you identified it? Very bad wording. |
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Question 3 (4 marks) While Bill is preparing his survey questions for Task A, he has an idea. He should interview some of his telemarketers face-to-face, rather than have them complete the online survey. He could digitally record the interviews and use the recordings to create a multimodal online report, rather than preparing just a text- and image-based report. Bill thinks it will take a day to digitally record the interviews and he will have to add a day to the time it takes to prepare the multimodal online report. Bill would like his idea to have as little impact as possible on his project's timeline. a. From your Gantt chart on page 18 [of the printed exam], suggest the best date for Bill to conduct the face-to-face interviews in relation to the other tasks. Explain how your suggestion minimises the impact of the interviews on the overall project timeline. Suggested date 7 December Explanation By the 7th, he has finished the search for online sources and is idle while telemarketers respond. He can use this slack time for the new task. 'Slack time' is not strictly an examinable term, but I highly recommend you become familiar with the concept. b. Taking into account your suggested date in part a. and the extra time needed to prepare the multimodal online report, describe the overall impact of Bill's idea on the project timeline. The project will take one extra day. The interviews do not affect the end date, but the extra day needed to finish the report pushes the end date back by one day.
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Question 4 (5 marks) In the online survey, Bill wants to ask his telemarketers why working from home appeals to them. a. Describe a way Bill could arrange for the responses to these questions to be coded to support manipulation once the survey is closed. 2 marks Assuming the answers are free-form, open-ended and text-based (i.e. people answer using whatever words they like) - which is the only reason coding of the responses would be necessary - Bill could create a translation list such as:
But why on earth would a survey ask such open-ended questions and make coding necessary? b. Using the coding method described in part a. i. describe one technique Bill could use to identify any patterns in the responses to the survey questions 2 marks He could count the number each coded response appears, and draw a pie chart that graphically shows their relative frequencies. ii. identify the type of pattern Bill could expect to find. 1 mark A higher occurrence of 'Great Extent' responses for those questions that affect respondents personally and would contribute to their wellbeing? In other words, all three questions! This question is a bit like the old annoying 'Guess what the examiner's thinking' questions. It's clear the writer of the question had a particular pattern in mind and wanted students to see it too.
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Question 5 (6 marks) While completing his online search for Task D, Bill has found a report prepared by Deloitte Access Economics. Data sets 1 and 2 in the insert show two tables from that report that Bill would like to use in his report to support his hypothesis.
a. State two variables in Bill's hypothesis regarding the telemarketers. 2 marks 2. (Dependent variable) - Choose one of these...
Item from Data set 1 Any one of these...
One of these...
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Time for an editorial break: Well, thrillseekers, we're five questions into section C, and I'm now wondering if this is really a 'Computing' exam at all. The new course seems to have left behind many of the things for which kids used to enrol in IT. But anyhoo, let's press on...
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Question 6 (3 marks) Bill is concerned that a table of figures might not communicate his message to the Board of Directors. Describe another way for Bill to present Data set 1 in his multimodal online report. As part of your description, indicate how he might take advantage of the digital recordings and/or online presentations to highlight an item relating to his hypothesis in his multimodal online report.
I'll let you decide which would be most effective.
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Question 7 (2 marks) Mary, the marketing manager, has come up with an idea to help cut costs. She has proposed that her online marketing department use email to contact InformUs' participants rather than the telemarketing department calling participants individually. Explain one benefit of minimising risk for the InformUs information management strategy that Mary's proposal would have. To begin with, I don't understand the question. Or is it clumsily asking for a benefit of cloud storage over local database storage? And which particular 'strategy' is the question referring to? The existing strategy of phoning participants from the city call centre? The proposed strategy of telemarketers phoning participants from their homes and sending data via the VPN? I don't know how students interpreted the question. I particularly feel sorry for the ESL kids trying to work out what on earth it means. Here's an answer: One benefit of minimising risk for the information management strategy is that having less risk will make the strategy safer. There. I think that does it. Two marks, please. When students find a question ambiguous or confusing, I advise them to try to read the examiner's
mind and work out what the semantically-deficient question was probably trying to ask. In this case, however, I can't even confidently guess what the examiner is trying to say. It's a double-headed failure. I'm guessing the answer will turn out to be something like Cloud storage is offsite, so it can't be damaged by local disaster. Bill has completed his multimodal online report for the Board of Directors. The Board has agreed to Bill's original proposal for the telemarketers to work from home and call survey participants individually. [Click here to skip a pedantic quibble] If the board agrees to Bill's original proposal, does it mean that Bill had a second proposal? Bill has completed his multimodal online report for the Board of Directors. The Board has agreed to Bill's proposal for the telemarketers to work from home and call survey participants individually. or, probably better... Bill has completed his multimodal online report for the Board of Directors. The Board has agreed to Bill's proposal rather than Mary's. Telemarketers will work from home and call survey participants individually. This version would at least acknowledge the death and disappearance of Mary's (significantly better) proposal. I wish VCAA would hire an English teacher to proof-read their IT exams for clarity. [End of pedantic quibble] Since Bill's proposal will go ahead, he has hired Minh, a web applications developer, to create the web-based user interface that the telemarketers will use and a database to store the survey responses they enter.
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Question 8 (6 marks) Minh's first task is to construct a user flow diagram. She has drawn the user flow diagram shown on page 25 [of the printed exam] but has not included any data protection requirements. Why describe its location and draw a line to it. Surely one or the other would be sufficient? • state the type of control required "Security control" is a new piece of study design jargon. It appears in U4O2 KK11 - "physical and software security controls for preventing unauthorised access to data and information and for minimising the loss of data accessed by authorised and unauthorised users." The glossary in the study design adds: Physical security controls are the equipment and procedures used to assist in the protection of information systems and the files created, communicated and stored by individuals and organisations.
Physical procedures include
About Software security controls the glossary says... Software security controls are the software and procedures used to assist in the protection of information systems and the files created, communicated and stored by individuals and organisations.
So - thanks, study design! That's useful. But where do we stick this key knowledge (KK) in this question? I was going to start with 'encryption' before employee login, but the case study says users are connected to the database via VPN, so encryption is already taken care of. Is it not? Should it be added to the UFD? I have no idea. Would students get credit for adding 'encryption' as a security control? I'm guessing the examiners want one physical control and one software control, since the study design designates them so. That might help to guide one's thinking... Backups are conspicuously absent, so we can toss that physical control in after the data has been collected. Now, looking for a software control...
VCAA has said that there will be no prescribed format for UFDs. But if VCAA ever examines students on the detailed nature of the arrows, shapes, shading, underlining, or structure of an unpublished, unofficial and arbitrary UFD format that they've invented in a back room just for an exam, I will be mightily cross. Remember that - unlike the study design - VCAA exams are not themselves part of the examinable canon. And it's unfair when they try to do that.
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Question 9 (4 marks) Minh starts designing the web pages that form the user interface. She has started with the survey questions' page. One question at a time will be displayed and the telemarketer will enter the participant's response. "db entry only Again, this will probably confuse at least ESL students who may not associate "db" with "database". And the second sentence is unnecessarily obscure in meaning. The annotation could have more clearly and briefly been written: "These boxes only display text from the database. Users cannot type in these boxes."
a. When answering a survey question, participants will be given a range of options to choose from. Minh is unsure about which of the following data entry methods to use: She has been told that the telemarketers must be able to enter responses as quickly as possible. Which one of the three data entry methods should Minh choose? Justify your choice. 3 marks Data entry method Radio buttons Justification All options are visible onscreen, and data entry requires only one mouse click. There is no typing into a textbox, or clicking to activate a menu and then clicking a menu item. b. Minh's design also shows an area to be used for navigation buttons. Based on the user flow diagram shown on page 25 [of the printed exam], identity one button that should be placed in this area and briefly state its purpose. 1 mark
OK. Maybe not the last one.
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Question 10 (2 marks) Australian postcodes are made up of four digits and there are currently over 3000 postcodes in use. On the participant details' page, the telemarketer has to enter the participant's postcode. Describe a validation technique Minh could use to ensure a valid postcode is entered by the telemarketer. Any of these: 1. An existence check - to check that data has actually been entered.
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Question 11 (2 marks) For each telephone number that is dialled, the database will first receive a block of data in the following format. Thank DOG the examiner interpreted Boolean correctly! Too often people (and exams) assume that ANY question with only two possible answers is "Boolean" and that's not correct. Field Gender ('M' or 'F') ... is NOT Boolean. It would be string, text or character. But Field Male? - (True or False) ... IS Boolean. Bonus fact: Boolean true/false values are stored numerically. Zero means false, and non-zero (typically 1 or -1) means true.
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After the telemarketer has entered the participant's response, a second block of data will be received.
Minh is creating a relational database to store this data. Explain why the data in this format is not in first normal form. There are multiple question/answer values in the Q/A field, which violates 1NF which requires each field to contain only a single datum. A nice, easy and straightforward normalisation question.
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Question 13 (6 marks) Shane has just started work with InformUs as a receptionist. He has discovered that the telephone numbers that the telemarketers use can be downloaded by anyone logged in to the InformUs network. a. Explain an ethical reason why Shane should not use the InformUs list of telephone numbers. 2 marks The data was collected for a different purpose and the data suppliers did not consent to it being used for fund-raising. It would be an error to quote the Privacy Act's requirement that data should not be used for a secondary purpose. The question clearly asks for an ethical and not a legal reason.
b. Shane's manager at InformUs thinks it is a great idea for Shane to use the InformUs list of telephone numbers and, since InformUs does not have a privacy policy, he cannot see anything wrong with Shane doing this. What two pieces of advice should be given to InformUs about its information management strategies with regard to the use of people's telephone numbers and personal details? Provide reasons to support the advice. 4 marks OK. Let's get this out of the way. Is InformUs subject to the Privacy Act? Does it turn over more than $3m a year? Students need to be given sufficient relevant information to make appropriate decisions! Assuming that InformUs is subject to the Privacy Act 1988 because it turns over more than $3 million a year, InformUs is obliged by the privacy principles to: 1. Create and publicly publish a privacy policy that sets out what data it collects and how it is used. 2. Not use data collected for one purpose for a secondary purpose without the permission of the data provider. And - we're done! |
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END OF QUESTION AND ANSWER BOOK |
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* Many thanks for Steven Wright for letting me steal his joke.
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Created 10 November 2016
Last changed: March 9, 2022 11:35 AM
Original Content © Mark Kelly 2016
Images and questions are © Victorian Curriculum
and Assessment Authority 2016.
Reproduced here with permission for educational purposes.
Thanks, VCAA!
VCE Applied Computing Notes © Mark Kelly
Section C summary
Task B in C1 was either unfairly tricky, or carelessly overcomplicated for students. Otherwise, project management was handled quite reasonably.
C7 was a nightmare of incomprehensibility. What on earth was it trying to say and examine? Truly it was a failure of a question.
C8 is concerning if it's aimed to establing a de facto UFD standard for exams. If VCAA wants to set a template as they did with ERD, fine! But do it openly and honestly, not by stealth and later claiming it to be 'traditional'.
Thank the divine Labrador that the exam did not decide to examine students on the messy and artificial problems of 2NF. I hope they forever remember that 2NF problems are completely preventable by using dedicated a key field for each table. Focus on problems that database developers need to avoid in real life, such as 1NF and 3NF.
Well, lads and lassies, we got to the end. Yay! I'm not sure if I'll do it again next year. We shall see.