[Year 12 IT Apps] Possible serious marking issue - ITA exam

[David Dawson]

Hi
I love this type of discussion.
I really hope the answer here is text or string (for the programmer
types) as of course phone numbers are never calculated fields - hence
there is NEVER a need for them to be numeric.
The other argument is that if you used a long (numeric) data type and
an input mask it would be more than 11 bytes long and would be a more
inefficient bit of programming. I also assume that you would need to add
a "zero" to the front of the numerical type or the zero will be lost as
it is not stored in numerical types. International phone numbers also
start with a + and are always strings. The answer should be text as some
students may not think about input masks - as they may have done some
programming in languages like Filemaker, PHP/Java and a DB in MySQL etc.
- the answer should therefore not be software or language dependent and
the question says database - not MS Access.
Good exam overall.

David Dawson
Head of Information Technology Learning Area
Head of Learning Technologies
St Kilda Rd Campus
Wesley College 
577 St Kilda Rd
Melbourne 3004
Ph 8102 6340
Mob 0425 718147


>>> itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au 11/10/10 7:28 pm >>>
Hi all (and Paula)

ITA exam, Section B, Q2. Phone number data type.

Another little birdie has suggested that (as I vaguely wondered in the
post mortem), the underlining of the digits in the phone number was
somehow supposed to tell students that the data was filtered through an
input mask and that the data type should be numeric.

The use of input masks, and the meaning of the underlining, were NOT
explained in the explanatory data, and Filemaker students have never
heard of input masks. Asserting that the answer is 'numeric' would be
unfair.

And if it were an input mask, were the 0 and 3 in the area code also
underlined? (I don't have the printed exam with me, but I think they
were not.)
Then again, if it's not an input mask, why were the digits underlined? 
It's unnecessarily confusing.

So 'text' should be an acceptable response for the phone number in that
question.

Regards
Mark

-- 
Mark Kelly
Manager Information Systems
Reporting Manager
IT Learning Area Manager

McKinnon Secondary College
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Victoria, Australia
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kel at mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au <mailto:kel at mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au>

VCE IT Lecture Notes: <http://vceit.com>
Moderator: IT Applications Edulist

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