[Year 12 IT Apps] Questions to test understanding

[O'Grady, Liam A]

Hi Everyone,

What makes a good exam/test question for IT? Do you have any that you would be happy to share?

Recently I was writing my yr 11 exams and trying to improve the questions I had that really give kids a chance to show their understanding of IT. The following questions arose in this process:

1.      How much should questions be about factual recall and how much about how to apply the knowledge?

2.      What is a good question?

3.      How could we write questions that are interesting enough that the kids want to answer them?

4.      How can we write a good question and make it easy to mark? For example, the question below whilst having scope for more detailed answers could also be harder to mark fairly.

One question I came up with is below. This is NOT a model question - just my attempt to get the ball rolling.

Question 7
St Mungo's is a large hospital network with hospitals in all Australian capital cities. All computer servers run from a datacentre in the main hospital in Hobart. These servers contain all the electronic information used by the hospital. This includes patient medical records, billing details, medical operations scheduling, staff details and the ordering system for medical supplies. All other branches connect to the datacentre via a VPN connection through the Internet.

They are thinking about moving to Cloud Computing because it is very expensive running their own datacentre in terms of staff and hardware. A couple of times recently there have been power failures in the datacentre which has meant that none of the hospitals could access the information needed to run.


a)      What would you recommend that they do? Justify your recommendation. (4 Marks)


Cheers
Liam O'Grady
Brunswick Secondary College

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