Computing: Software Development Exam Discussion 2016

[Aaron]

Computing: Software Development Exam Discussion 2016
Exam Date: Thursday 10 November, 11:45am - 2:00pm

The time has nearly arrived - this thread serves as a general discussion regarding the Software Development exam for 2016. If you have any uploads or something that doesn't fit the 'general' discussion, please feel free to create another thread. Of course, any repetitive threads will be merged

All the best with your Softdev exam this year! Feel free to post here if you have any preliminary thoughts.

[MightyBeh]

First! jk jk 

What scores are people aiming for? Anyone bothered with the very limited number of company exams? I've found from the few I've done that there's a number of pretty ridiculous questions.

Not entirely relevant, I feel, but it will be interesting to see if anything happens to SD scaling this year with the introduction of the SAT.

[MightyBeh]

Bumping because the exam was today. Didn't grab a spare copy because I didn't think they'd be in demand, whoops.

Overall I thought it was a pretty easy exam, not many questions stuck out to me as particularly difficult. I thought the UCD one didn't really match up to the three marks allocated for it but otherwise everything was very straightforward.

[Aaron]

Didn't grab a spare copy because I didn't think they'd be in demand, whoops.

WELL YOU THOUGHT WRONG. LOOK AT ALL OF THESE PEOPLE WANTING A COPY OF THE SD EXAM MightyBeh!

In all seriousness, what types of questions were on it?

[MightyBeh]

Right? Obviously let the team down. I think a three week ban is in order.

Case study was very standard. It was about developing a mobile app for a healthcare provider. A lot of analysisy type questions (as in the psm), included a 'fill in the blanks' context diagram and then a UCD where one of the use cases was missing, but it wasn't explicity stated what had to be done to fix it so I think a lot of people will drop marks on that. It was pretty regular 'what are their legal obligations' and 'which architecture would be better, why?' type of stuff. Lots of comparison. There was a short section of pseudocode (only like 6 lines or something) with a trace table but otherwise there wasn't a lot of 'hands on' programming stuff which might hurt the median. I'd still place it as easier than average, because it should have been very manageable for people who'd looked at their textbook or notes at least once. Not a lot of the questions were vey memorable.

Short answer a bit more interesting, with more actual programming skills in it. There was an obligitory question on hash tables and hash keys, because they're new, where numbers were divided by five and their remainder became the key. Numbers might've been 11, 17, 23, 8, 18 or something. The trick was probably to bait people who hadn't learned it into putting each number in ascending order in each section of the table rather than having them stack. There was a 6 mark algorithm question that was a bit tricky, to find the lowest number in a list that was sorted by the associated name instead of number. Pretty sure it just boiled down to a loop with a value comparison inside though. Standard question with a description of binary search (+ why the data had to be sorted) and then one of a linear search (+ why it didn't need to be sorted).

MCQs were maybe a bit tougher than normal, but none were really memorable. Interestingly enough the first question wasn't about the psm. One that stuck out was two lists of numbers where the sorting algorithm had to be worked out, had bubble sort in the answers even though I'm pretty sure that's off the study design. There was a nod to the windows upgrade backup system with OperatingSystem.old.

Tbh it didn't really feel like it covered everything; there wasn't a lot on organisational goals or really the psm at all which seemed a bit odd.