[Informatics] Exam Referencing Question

[McCleary Scott]

I don't like it either.  I didn't like it in 2016 when I told me kids "I can't imagine they'd ask you THAT on an exam", and I didn't like it much this year either.  And I can tell you, most kids will get it wrong.  As simple as it is to remember, it just seems an odd question given that referencing is important for all subjects.   I can only assume that because we deal with Secondary data it's important to make sure it referenced and therefore seems like a nice 1-2 mark question to put in an exam.


I made sure I told my kids this year to remember how to do it.

________________________________
From: informatics <informatics-bounces at edulists.com.au> on behalf of Phillip Donald <milsendonaldp at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, 27 November 2018 12:03:37 PM
To: Year 12 VCE Informatics Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: [Informatics] Exam Referencing Question

I'm very disappointed with Section B Q7b in the exam.

Write out the reference that Dion would put in his reference list? Really? This is 2018, references have been built into Word for years. This is esoteric nonsense, if I asked you to write down in the Harvard method the reference for your nearest textbook you wouldn't be able to do it without looking it up. However, I would bet that you could answer actually useful questions, such as why it's important to reference.

To be clear, Q7a is fine, I just don't think it's reasonable for students to remember silly things like the order to write out different elements in a specific order.

Pre-empting the "it's in the study design so it can be examined" "argument". This subject should be better than weak legalistic things like that, there's plenty of meaty content that could have been examined instead, also, refer to my challenge above.

Now that I've had my vent, what do you think?
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