Textbook

[joshuamorgan]

What textbook are people using/have people used? Mine is Thomson Software Development 3/4 (http://secondary.cengage.com.au/title/0170130584/633). It's shocking.

[dcc]

Im not sure that there are many textbooks for the SD course. I used that book last year and it was terrible, information just chucked into places and repeated :|

but for the most part, it teaches you what you need to know (and a lot which you don't need to know as well!)

[joshuamorgan]

Yeh, a lot of the questions are ambiguous and the questions refer to concepts that haven't been discussed. A questioned asked to compare batch processing and on-line processing but the book only discusses what batch processing is. How did you go about getting 48?

[dcc]

well, I did it in year 11, and my exam was about 9 days after the first two, so I had a good long time to memorize everything I could.

Learning concepts is very important, because as far as programming goes, the most they can ask you is to find a problem in some pseudocode that they provide, which if you have a good basis in programming shouldn't be a problem (it took me about 15 seconds to find the problem with the algorithm on the 2007 exam)

This website helped a lot:
http://www.mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au/vceit/main.htm

Just basicaly if you ever get a topic set in class (like say Information Systems) go home and do a bit of research into them and the different ways they can be used.  Just try to have a good basis in the theory of ITSD but also a good basis in programming (which I suppose is why they call it ITSD )

And as for the 48, probably luck & huge crammage

[joshuamorgan]

OK, sweet, thanks. I should be alright, I pulled off a 46 for VET IT. I suppose I'm worried because of the textbook/lack of good resources. Is the exam mostly programming oriented or is there some networking stuff (my forté)?

Thanks for the link! I actually stumbled across that site yesterday when I used Google Define for a better definition of 'batch processing'.

[dcc]

Well on the exam from last year, there was 1 question on exams, and that was something like:

'What is a hybrid network?'

It wasn't covered in the book, but it was on that website so luckily i knew it

[joshuamorgan]

What stream of VET IT did you do? I did Network Administration, hopefully knowledge from that comes in handy.

[dcc]

I think I did Software Apps. 

I wasn't really sure, VET IT wasn't a focus on me because it gets scaled so ridiculously.

My school had 50 people doing the Year 12 VET IT course and the whole subject only had about 300-400 so like, it screwed me up even more

[joshuamorgan]

Haha, 'tis annoying. I got 46, according to the paper only 5 or 6 people scored higher than me Few little mistakes on the exam can cost you serious points with respect to the study score.

Well, thanks for your help! Also, did you use Checkpoints or do practice exams?

[dcc]

uhhh well

i did 2 and they were VITTA ones.

and the answers were all incredibly off the mark.

Like for example a question they asked was like:
'If you blocked port 80 to a computer, what would the effect be?'

Now im not sure what it means by blocking port 80 to the computer but I interpreted that as preventing the computer from receiving connections on port 80.

But the answer they gave said that the internet would be blocked!

Now it is true that most web servers run on port 80, but the TCP/IP connection made on the client side isn't made on port 80 and thus blocking inbound connections on port 80 would only have the effect of stopping you from running a webserver.

Just try the VCAA ones, because they're similarish to the new course.

is there checkpoints? :|

[joshuamorgan]

LOL, OK. We got VITTA ones for VET IT and they sound like they were of similar quality.

Yeh, there is. Cambridge Checkpoints: VCE Software Development 3/4 Thanks for your help!

[dcc]

Nps.

Just one last thing: To get a good score in IT, all you need to do is try.  The majority of people in my class didn't do any work and their marks were expected. (not that I expected a 48, that was just like 'WTF LOL')

[joshuamorgan]

Most (95%) of the people in my class, and the other class (there are two), are assclowns who have no ambition of achieving high scores anyway. That's the only good aspect about being at an 'under-represented school', the competition within is almost non-existent.

[dcc]

OH you go to one too? how good is it?

[joshuamorgan]

It's good with respect to little competition within the school because other students couldn't care less, but the teaching can be shithouse. Although, I must admit, I had fantastic teachers for the two 3/4 units I completed last year.