[Informatics] VCAA prac exam

[Lydall, Quentin C]

Hi,
Thanks to those who put together the VCAA Informatics prac exam. It has been a very useful revision aid and exam prep tool.
Section B question 2 and Section C question 2 were, predictably, the most difficult for my students. Data structures and normalisation elude many students, as exam reports over the years have shown.
The ERD question was useful for later revision because the concepts of ‘entity’ and ‘transaction’ can take a while to sink in, but once they understood that the transactions themselves became tables in the RDB, it became clearer. I gave them the rule of thumb that transaction tables only have the two foreign keys (of the entities), quantities and dates. Didn’t mention nasties like current special offers. Thought I’d share that because it helped my students. Lights came on..
One thing that particularly baffled my top students, and rightly so, was C2bii: Ticket purchases’ primary key. They pointed out that if it were made up of Cust_ID + Ticket_Type, as shown, then the same customer would not be able to purchase a similar ticket, say next year, because it would require a duplicate key. Better to use an auto numbering system. I recommend that if it can be done, this should be revised in the sample exam.
Thanks for the posts and sharing (cow jokes aside!)
Quentin Lydall
Teacher
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