The irony cup runneth over.

Yup written assignments would be great in my opinion. I'm a bit dissapointed today but I will just have to better next time I guess.

Mark

i failed. the guy next to me walked out after 10 minutes. where the hell was the mcq? does this mean we must ignore exam prep papers because they contain bullsh1t?

be consistent damned, why lie to us? i will submit my complaint for sure. 18 points for graphs hell.

i just hope i get a supp for this one. thats if i get 45. i think its rather 10%.

to pass this exam you had to basically memorise the book. words like guidelines, principles, rules, practices, models, methods have all somewhat the same meaning to me, which threw me off.

bottomline. memorise the book like a parrot and you'll get 100%. That means take a week off work and start parroting!

never reading another exam prep in my life! you totally misled us. my study strategy was based on that 55 mcq and filling the blanks questions which WAS NOT IN THE F eXAM lair!

I again stress that learning the answers to MC Q's without knowing what they mean is pointless. If on the other hand you studied the source of the MC answers you would have been able to do the short Q's.

Thats absolute rubbish and you know it TvD. Its got nothing to do with "Learning the answers to the MCQ's" When you say an exam will contain a section with MCQ's, I prepare accordingly. Your "Study the source of the MCQ's" argument is nonsense, the whole bloody book is the source.

The fact is, the previous exam papers, assignments etc are normally there to give us a guideline as to what areas are important. Lets face it, you effectively dodged around all of them. I completed last years paper as well as all the assignments for revision and when I marked it myself, I reckoned I would have done pretty well. This years paper was on another level completely so last years paper, as well as the assignments were effectively useless in preparing for this exam.

To put what I am saying into context. Up until today I have never failed a module at UNISA. 23 Modules and my average mark across all of them is in the high 70's. I am typically an A student.

That exam was the worst paper I have ever written. EVER. The questions were crap. How can you ask about the trade-offs of Agile processes and then put in brackets (values) ??? Which is it ? Trade offs or values ? Make up your mind.


Lets be honest. You screwed us.

That is all.

TvD Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I again stress that learning the answers to MC Q's
> without knowing what they mean is pointless. If on
> the other hand you studied the origin of the MC
> answers you would have been able to do the short
> Q's.
>


This is very true. No point in knowing something you don't understand. But, and this is a very big but, people use different study methods for different kinds of questions.

If I knew there were going to be 0 multiple choice questions I would have spent my time studying memorizing as many facts as I possibly could. Instead I spend my time getting a grasp of the work and being able to apply it to case studies.

Anyway, its over now and I hope for the best, for all my fellow students sake. Nothing wrong with question 2 tbh. Question 1 would have been fine too, if we knew what was expected of us.

It would be very thoughtful if you could do that. I felt question 2 was a far better way of assessing our knowledge and understanding than Q1.

I also felt that a bulk of the questions from Q1 were quite vague in that they would ask for a list of elements and not quite give a hint as to which one of the 10000 lists in the book they are refering to, nor provide the context under which the question is being asked....

To add to my previous message, the physical format of the paper sucked too. Giving us 3 or 4 lines in a fixed format to answer questions doesn't work. Did you consider the fact that a person may make a mistake and need to rewrite the answer for some reason ? There was no space to do this for any of the question 1 questions, and the form clearly said any answers not completed on the form wouldn't be marked.

Please revert to using a normal answer book for any written answers.

I will discuss the views expressed here on Monday with the School's director...
TvD

This was my second exam for this year and, interestingly, the second exam that had some pretty large issues surrounding it and where students are severly unimpressed with different aspects of the respective papers. I'm wondering if this is a sign of things to come for the rest of my exams and I should start worrying ...

Have to admit that I didn't find Q2 too intimidating. I had a pretty good recollection on context-, DFD's and Use cases from INF207 last year, and the case study felt familiar (I am sure it was asked in another exam and/or assignment of one of my previous INF modules). Had no problem with the questions we were given to prepare either and the warning about having to apply webapp development did help tremendously. Did feel that the majority of my time was spent on covering the diagrams and it seemed a tremendous amount of details that needed to be covered in 3 diagrams for 18 points. My DFD alone had about 18 different actions! It also would have been nice if there was an indication as to how many marks were allocated to which diagram.

Q1 however was a different story all together. Other than the prepared questions, I pretty much filled those lines with a load of bull! I have to agree with some of the comments made. My preparation method for MCQ is to get an overall view of the material to be able to answer MCQ and in a lot of instances I answer them through a process of elimination.

In defence of the examinator, we were given the following guidelines:

Three pre-prepared questions: 10
(of which you could have gotten at least 7)
Web development question: 15
(of which even if you only memorised the steps you could have gotten 5)
The context, DFD and use case diagrams: 18
(admittedly, here you would have had to know how to apply and also would have needed an indication as to how much detail were expected)
43% of the paper was known!!!

I have tried my hardest in interpreting the questions in Q1 from practical experience rather then writing down verbatim.

I hope this counts as something towards answering the questions.

The Sassly question is representative from last years exam however drawing them as detailed as last year is soemthing I never expected hence it was a bit harsh.

The SUpp requirement is 30% and above.

thanks

Yousuf.

I will be glad to know the answers for question 1 b the 4 trade-offs.
Also like to know the 3 characteristics of object-oriented systems.
As far as question 2 is concerned I think the question was fair enough
However, I had some difficulties in understanding for which system the diagrams were to be drawn. was it for the web-based system or for the shop computer system. I think I confused the level 1 flow diagram with level 2 a bit. However, I have a complain concerning question 1. It was clearly mentionned in the exam tut that it will be a combination of multiple choice and short question and it did not had multiple choice. Moreover, some of the questions were too general not really focussing the principles and concepts discussed in the textbook
in more detail.I also lost some concentration because they did a mistake in writing my index number the wrote 3397 instead of 3399 and that I did not like at all.

>>
I again stress that learning the answers to MC Q's without knowing what they mean is pointless. If on the other hand you studied the source of the MC answers you would have been able to do the short Q's

That not the point!

The point is if my lecturers say "we will ask this so you study like that" then i say "yes boss, how high do i jump"

We were mislead that is the point. Monday I'll by phoning in. I want my money back or a re exam. This is theft!

Look up the word "will" in the dictionary.

"We WILL ask mcq..."

Hi

Me i just want to know what are the lecturers saying about or what r theri comments about the paper. They must agree that they screwed us big time and must apologise. cause they send us the previous paper, but did not mention that the structure of the paper/ format will change and we prepared ourselves based on that structure of last year.

How do you prepareto drive a car by riding a bicycle......obviously u won't be able to drive that car.

GOOD LUCK with the rest of the exams.

I honestly thought there would be MCQ or essay type questions to test general knowledge of facts. Like the diff between verification/validation and maybe the diff between some of the process models.

I studied hard to understand the content and feel done in that only the high level lists were asked. Like shaunfut I'm also an A student, but I have never done so bad.

I panicked and just gave up!

Glad to see i am not the only one that hit rock bottom with this one.

This was just unexpected and misleading and personally dissapointing considering the amount of time I put in to prepare for this exam.

best of luck with the rest of the exams - this one being the first of my 8 exams - i just hope the rest are not going to be equally dissapointing.

what made this experience even worse is that for the first 1.5- 2 hrs of the paper we had no lights and ventilation in our exam venue - this in a very hot Nelspruit at this time of the year...

Hi just, as frustrated with the paper as everyone else. I think all concerns of the paper have been covered. Just want something done about this paper. Rediculous effort from the lecturer's with regard to a response about the exam...At least we need an explanation of what exactly happened?? Did you'll change the exam and forget to change the syllabus or what is it..

Anyhow, Whats done is done, i wanted to leave the exam as soon as i saw that 55% ie. more than half the paper....wasn't what it is supposed to be. The only thing I know for sure is i got 7 marks at least for ch 11/12.

Another thing, i dont know how anyone else feels, but this has completely broken my confidence in the material that unisa sends us. Are we to believe what we are trained on in the tutorial letters and study guides. Or should we just register for a module and based on what the module is, we should all study accordingly, gathering all knowledge that we can find. And then sit an exam, similar to what we had, where we should not give a damn about what the lecturer's say is going to be tested. There is something to ponder about..

Pissed Off.
Vishkir.

PS::Good luck to all who are still writing papers.

Vishkir.
- Lifes a journey and I'm enjoying the ride

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Posting a couple of days late, but here are my 2 cents worth.

The first tut letter said to us not to learn parrot fashion, but rather be able to apply knowledge. It's fine that they did not ask us any mcq's but I feel that we should have been asked more scenario questions.
eg. What model would you choose for .... or compare model a to model b.

I confused myself with all the lists that were in my head.

Oh well, here's hoping for a supp. Next time I will not take much notice of past papers because this exam was nothig like last year. I prepared myself for last years format of questions and when I opened the exam booklet, I thought I was in the wrong exam .

Holding thumbs for everyone!!!!

After discussions with the School's Director we have found a solution that will satisfy those who are unhappy about the omission of mcq's from the exam, as well as those students that are unhappy about the cramped answering spaces for Q1

We will use another mcq mark that is available to us for each student
individually, as a substantial addition to Q1

This is unfortunately all I can say so please do not ask me to elaborate on this any further

TvD