[Year 12 IT Apps] 2011 VCAA Sample Exam

Tue Oct 16 20:21:09 EST 2012

Sorry for flooding your inboxes, everyone!

The other issue I have is that the definition for effectiveness as provided in the Glossary of the Study Design states that "measures of an effective solution include... usability".  So, what does 'usability' mean?  According to a number of online sources, the usability of a product relates to its "ease of use"!  Wikipedia (I know, don't start) defines the term in the first sentence under the entry for 'usability' in the following manner:

"Usability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object"

If we accept this, then how can "ease of use" then be classified as a measure of efficiency in the same glossary of the same study design?  Is "ease of use" a measure of both efficiency AND effectiveness? 

I think this point really needs to be clarified.

Cheers,
Gary

PS: No more messages from me on this topic, though I look forward to whatever clarification others may provide.
________________________________________
From: itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au [itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au] on behalf of Vear, Gary D [vear.gary.d at edumail.vic.gov.au]
Sent: Tuesday, 16 October 2012 7:54 PM
To: Year 12 IT Applications Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Year 12 IT Apps] 2011 VCAA Sample Exam

Hi Joyce,

Thanks for replying.  We could debate the "ease of use" issue for hours, which is why it's somewhat frustrating that there is no definitive, consistent definition on the VCAA website, as shown through the links I provided below.

To me, an information solution may be easier to use than another, but not necessarily save you time, effort, or money (my understanding of efficiency).  Here I'm thinking about some softwares I've used in the past.  Using Adobe Premiere, for example, is not as "easy to use" as Windows Movie Maker, but the latter has cost me more wasted hours in terms of rendering videos that won't play on anything except the PC on which it was created.  In such instances, a product may be easy to use but actually be inefficient in terms of producing an information solution.

Hope that clarifies where I'm approaching this "debate".

Thanks again for the input.

Cheers,
Gary
________________________________________
From: itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au [itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au] on behalf of Joyce Tabone [jtabone at aitkencollege.edu.au]
Sent: Tuesday, 16 October 2012 7:28 PM
To: Year 12 IT Applications Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Year 12 IT Apps] 2011 VCAA Sample Exam

Hi Gary

With respect to "ease of use". I would consider this to be efficiency as it relates to effort.  Less effort is required to use the information product. i ttend to put effectiveness in terms of the quality of the information product, such as the product is accurate, timely, has clarity etc.

Welcome debate.

Cheers
Joyce
________________________________________
From: itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au [itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au] on behalf of Vear, Gary D [vear.gary.d at edumail.vic.gov.au]
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2012 6:06 PM
To: Year 12 IT Applications Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Year 12 IT Apps] 2011 VCAA Sample Exam

Hi all,

I share Mark's view with respect to Q7 in Section A in that "ease of use" should be considered a measure of effectiveness rather than efficiency, but unless I've misread the situation then it appears that the VCAA has published some very confusing documentation on this point.

For example, if you go to the following webpage, you will find "ease of use" listed under the definition for effectiveness:  http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/ict/glossary.html

And yet, if you look in the Glossary section of the current Study Design you will find written under the definition for efficiency the claim that "measures of an efficient solution include...the ease of use of the solution..." (see page 13 of the following document: http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/vce/infotech/infotechsd2011-2014.pdf).

Okay, so which is which?  Please bear in mind that I have not taught IT Applications prior to this year, so I have no prior knowledge of any prior debates over these definitions that may exist.  In either case, it seems that one of the two definitions referenced above should be removed to avoid potential future confusion.

**********

For a couple of other questions in Section A, I felt that other answers were "more correct" (sorry to disagree, Mark):

Q5 = A. sitemap (though I understand Mark's reasoning, I have suggested this answer to my students as being the best choice based on the textbook) and

Q9 = B. foreign key (unless I have COMPLETELY misunderstood relational databases).

I'd appreciate learning what others think about these questions in particular.

Thanks,
Gary

________________________________
From: itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au [itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au] on behalf of Mark KELLY [kel at mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au]
Sent: Tuesday, 16 October 2012 3:05 PM
To: Year 12 IT Applications Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Year 12 IT Apps] 2011 VCAA Sample Exam

Thank ye kindly, good sir.  Kevork and I produced answers for the SD sample questions<http://www.vceit.com/studydesign/SD-sample-answers-2011.htm>, but I haven't had much of a look at the ITA questions before, but here are some sample answers for the sample questions...  For those impatient to find my answer to Anthony's question, jump to the end.

Section A

1. A
2. B
3. D
4. A
5. B (a storyboard has more navigational detail than a sitemap)
6. C
7. A (I still argue that 'ease of use' should be an effectiveness criterion rather than being put efficiency. I think 'ease of use' has been confused with 'amount of labour' (e.g. manhours). Anyway...
8. C?
9. C

Section B

1a. Gender.
1b. It could show years of birth rather than ages, since people tend to remember a YOB even if their arithmetic is so bad that they can't calculate their current age.
1c. Provide a privacy policy, use SSL or TLS secure connections, offer prizes.
1d. They can receive information that may be useful or valuable to them. e.g.  they can find that a pain in the leg could mean the leg is broken.
1e. If one table lists all the drugs, another table could consist of pairs of drug IDs and corresponding descriptions of risks that may exist when the 2 drugs are taken together.

2. It would require high bandwidth capabilities to cope with video streaming.

3a. Gender (but it's a bad choice of field to ask that question about. It would be better as a true/false field)
3b. CamelCase - so multi-word names are more readable. Hungarian Notation - to identify variable/object types as well as naming them, so they are not accidentally treated as a different type of data or object.
3c. First normal form: divide address_suburb into separate fields. Second normal form: create a unique user ID field.
3d. Normalisation removes most data duplication, which makes data maintenance easier and data inconsistencies easier to find.
Having links between related fields allows you to enforce referential integrity so key fields cannot be deleted if they have related fields that would be made 'orphans'.
Having tables that contain all allowable values of a field (e.g. states of Australia, product codes) let you enforce validation so data input has to exist in the limited list of the values present in that table

4. subject = Entity.
supervises = Relationship.
Firstname = attribute.
MarkID = key field? (why are some attributes shaded and some are not? Does it mean white attributes are separate elements to grey ones?)
But it's a dodgy ERD: no cardinality (1/many indicators) are included. More ERD info<http://vceit.com/slideshows/Design-Tools-ERD.ppt>.

5a. This is a vague one - what is it after? The webpage order form mails the data in the form's fields to the organisation? The webpage uses some PHP or similar coding to process the data in the order form and store it in a MySQL database?  Such vague question annoy me.
5b. So they can sell products and make a profit.  So they know what the customer wants to buy, where to send the goods, and how to charge the purchaser. A silly question unless I've missed something...
5c. Post a privacy policy saying how the collected data will be used. Encrypt the web communications so personal/financial data cannot be intercepted. Protect the stored data from unauthorised use.

6a. Surnames are often not unique, and the wrong members may be identified.
6b. A phone number could contain spaces, dashes, parentheses, + symbols etc that cannot be stored in a numeric field.
6c. Radio button - it forces people to enter one (and only one) valid response.

7. SS - sort products by sales quantities, graph products' sales, use conditional formatting to highlight sales below average.  Do the same things by suburb instead of products.
RDBMS - create a summary field [Filemaker Pro] that sums a product's sales across all suburbs. Create a find (query) to select suburbs/products that fall below a target value. Use a layout (report) to display/print the products and/or suburbs. Last year the average mark for the 8 mark question was 2... not a happy first time out for the ambitious 8-marker!

8a. Usernames & passwords. She'd need to password-protect a folder on the site that requires a valid username/password before a visitor can enter the folder.
8b.Once again, the case study does not give enough information to decide if the Privacy Act applies.  Kids would have to explain their reasoning... If NowKitchens turns over more than $3 per annum, it would be subject to the Privacy Act 1988 which requires holders of personal information to protect the information from unauthorised access (e.g. by other customers). It also prevents NowKitchens from using the information for a purpose other than for which it was originally collected.

9. Antivirus scanners up to date and running; firewall to prevent hackers getting in; encryption of sensitive or personal information being stored (e.g. PGP) or communicated (TLS on the web, WPA2 on Wifi); physical security of computer resources; regular, tested backups of data stored offsite; training of staff to prevent them falling prey to social engineering (e.g. phishing, opening attachments, giving passwords over the phone). An org should protect customer data carefully whether or not it's subject to the Privacy Act, Health Records Act, or Info Privacy Act (go on about the things that makes an org
subject to these acts); conduct penetration tests and/or software audits to find holes in security; use passwords to protect equipment, documents, data from misuse.  etc.

10a.  They can all access and share the same data at the same time, so they always get up-to-date information. They can collaborate easily, e.g. joint simultaneous editing of a document.
10b. Cloud backup is slow, e.g. to copy a 100M document would take many minutes even with a fast internet connection, compared to seconds to save it to hard disk. The cloud service provide may not be reliable: they may misuse backed-up data, go out of business suddenly (e.g. MegaUpload), or suddenly cancel the company's account and lock them out of their data (e.g. Google).

This brings us to the original question asked by Anthony.

The actual full question is, "Outline a procedure for the disposal of client data that Stratospheric Solutions could follow when using cloud computing." which gives clue or two more. It is not referring to a procedure used by the cloud service provider.

But the answer is still "just delete the client data": they would not be able to wipe/overwrite it since the storage device upon which the data are stored on is beyond their control.  I don't see what else a kid could offer to earn 3 marks.

Quibbles, additions, corrections are welcome.

On 16 October 2012 13:09, Watson, Donald R <watson.donald.r at edumail.vic.gov.au<mailto:watson.donald.r at edumail.vic.gov.au>> wrote:
This what you’re after?

http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/vce/infotech/IT-Apps-samp.pdf

Don Watson

From: itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au<mailto:itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au> [mailto:itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au<mailto:itapps-bounces at edulists.com.au>] On Behalf Of Mark KELLY
Sent: Tuesday, 16 October 2012 12:42 PM
To: Year 12 IT Applications Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Year 12 IT Apps] 2011 VCAA Sample Exam

Hmmm. When I try to download the sample questions<http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vcaa/vce/studies/infotech/it-applications/publications/IT-Apps-samp.pdf> from the VCAA site, I'm getting a mangled 666 byte file.

But taking a rough stab at the question, I'd say: "Select the file and click 'DELETE'".

Pretty easy 3 marks...

Unless it's an ambiguous question and it's referring to how the cloud computing host would dispose of deleted data (e.g. flushing all duplicates on all their servers, clearing the cache, wiping the file from hard disks, erasing the file from archives...)

But I'd still believe that a kid would have to earn 3 marks for saying "Click Delete".

On 16 October 2012 11:58, Anthony Sullivan <asullivan at tps.vic.edu.au<mailto:asullivan at tps.vic.edu.au>> wrote:
Question 10
Outline a procedure to dispose of data stored in the cloud
3 marks

Can someone explain to me the solution to the above question?

Anthony  Sullivan
Head of Information Technology

T: 03 9788 7796<tel:03%209788%207796> | F: 03 9787 7646<tel:03%209787%207646> | Wooralla Drive, Mt. Eliza, Vic, 3930 | asullivan at tps.vic.edu.au<mailto:asullivan at tps.vic.edu.au> | www.tps.vic.edu.au<http://www.tps.vic.edu.au>

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