CMT207 exam information – Spring 2020
I appreciate that these are extraordinary times and that additional guidance regarding the exam revision is in order. I would usually point students to past exam papers:
https://intranet.cardiff.ac.uk/students/study/exams-and-assessment/before-your-exams/past- exam-papers
However, this year we are changing the assessments for obvious reasons. You will have received the following information about these changes from the Director of Teaching, Dr Martin Chorley
We hope you are keeping well and safe.
Your module leaders will shortly be in touch with information regarding revision material and practice assessments for the upcoming exam period (if they have not done so already), but we’d like to provide you with more general detail on the changes to assessments that the School has made as a result of the move to online teaching and assessment.
As you will know, all in-person exams have been cancelled. In most of our modules this means that the exam has been moved to an online open-book format. In a few of our modules the exam has been replaced with a different form of assessment, and where this is the case you will have already been informed by the module leader.
We have been approached by some students expressing concern that this change in assessment will lead to them being disadvantaged in some way, or that it will lead to you having to sit harder assessments. We’d like to reassure you that this is not the case.
In order to move from in-person to online open-book assessments we have taken the existing in- person exams as a starting point. Module leaders have then revised these, considering that rather than being taken under exam conditions you will instead have access to online resources and materials. This means that many of the exams will have had ‘bookwork’ or ‘memorisation’ type questions removed and will instead feature more ‘application’ type questions. So, instead of being asked to simply re-state a definition of something you may instead be asked how that thing applies in a given situation or scenario.
These changes will not have made the exams any ‘harder’, and the School will be looking at every revised assessment over the next couple of days to ensure that it is still of an appropriate
difficulty considering the level and weighting of the assessment and that it still covers the learning outcomes of the module.
These exams will be made available through Learning Central, and you will submit your solutions as a .pdf file through Learning Central too. Exact details of the process are still being finalised, and more guidance will be released once we return after Easter. The School will also be running a ‘mock’ exam process to allow you to see how these assessments will work in practice, and to provide you with an opportunity to check that you can access the assessments and upload solutions correctly. Again, more details on this will be provided shortly.
Dear student,
1
to ensure that marks are fair and reliable. A sample of each of our submitted assessments will be moderated internally to check consistency. We will also conduct analysis of the marks to compare mark distributions within and across modules and years. A range of options are available to exam boards (in consultation with external examiners) to adjust marks or discount modules where this is deemed to be necessary. As the University has stated: “the principle that no student should be disadvantaged in terms of their achievement as a result of the crisis is an important one. We will be producing further guidance shortly but we can assure our students that we will be implementing a no-detriment approach.”
I appreciate that this is a stressful time, and that it may be frustrating that we cannot communicate the full details of the process yet, but we have to make sure that our plans have been fully scrutinised before confirming. As soon as we have more details on the process for the online examinations and further information on the no-detriment policy we will make these available to you. In the meantime, if you have any further concerns please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Thanks, Martin
Following completion of the assessment period we will follow the usual quality assurance process
I will now supplement this general information with specific information about the CMT207 exam.
Exam format
In the process of moving from in-person to online open-book exam, the original exam paper has been changed as follows:
▪ All bookwork questions have been removed.
▪ All problem-solving questions have been retained.
▪ Additional problem-solving questions have been added to cover the module’s learning
outcomes to an appropriate extent.
▪ As a result, the exam is actually shorter than the original one.
▪ There are 4 questions in total:
1. Question 1 – Security, transactions, concurrency
2. Question 2 – Data mining
3. Question 3 – Non-relational data models
4. Question 4 – Semantic web
▪ These questions are based on the information provided in the lecture slides.
▪ In terms of difficulty and type, they resemble problems solved in lectures and labs.
▪ Each question is worth 10 marks.
▪ You only need to answer 3 questions for a maximal overall mark of 30, which will be scaled to
match 50% of the overall mark.
▪ Unfortunately, it is not be possible to produce a mock exam paper in the given timeline.
However, you can still re-use past exam papers (the link is at the top of this document).
Simply, look for any problem-solving questions in these papers and ignore the bookwork ones.
▪ For information on the date/time of the exam, please keep an eye on the Student Intranet
and your emails. I cannot release this information myself.
2
Revision
1. Week 05 – Security, transactions, concurrency
2. Week 08 – XML, JSON, NoSQL
3. Week 09 – Data mining, but only the following lectures:
▪ Lecture_03_Similarity and distance ▪ Lecture_04_Clustering
▪ Lecture_05_Classification
4. Week 11 – Semantic Web
▪ Please study the lecture slides and if needed watch the Panopto videos.
▪ Please do the lab exercises. I have made the solutions available on Learning Central.
▪ Please use the problem-solving questions from past exams to practice.
▪ No model solutions to previous exam papers will be released as these questions are
periodically recycled.
▪ However, all questions are indeed similar to those provided in lectures and labs. Therefore,
the exercises presented in lectures and labs should be sufficient to illustrate the expected answers.
▪ Based on the exam questions (see above), you only need to revise the following material:
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
As before, I will maintain a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), which will be provided below. Therefore, keep an eye on this document, which will be updated periodically. Before e-mailing your questions to me, please check if your questions has already been answered here.
Q01
I did not find the timing of the online-assessment on the exam timetable. When will the exam start? When is the deadline I need to submit the online-assessment? And where can I find the window of it on learning central?
A
Unfortunately, I have no answer to any of the above as these matters are decided
centrally by the School and I do not participate in these discussions. What I know is that a consistent approach will be used across all modules, so please keep an eye on emails from the School and, in particular, the Director of Teaching.
UPDATE: By now, you will have received the following information from the Director of Teaching:
▪ Exams will be accessed through Learning Central. They will be available for 24 hours on the day of the exam as specified by the centrally-produced exam timetable. Once started you will only have the duration of the exam to complete and submit your solutions.
▪ You will have the usual duration of the exam + 1 hour in which to download the exam paper, complete the questions and submit your solutions. The usual duration for the CMT207 exam is 2 hours. Therefore, you will have 3 hours in total to complete the CMT207 exam.
▪ Solutions should be typed and submitted as a single PDF document. Some solutions may be hand-written (e.g. graphs) or produced using other software. In all cases these must be embedded within your solutions document either by scanning or photographing or by exporting and importing into your solutions.
3
normal working hours (9-5) UK time. Please plan accordingly.
▪ There is a practice exam available in the Assessment area of the COMSC-SCHOOL
module on Learning Central. This is intended to allow you to practice the process of accessing the exam paper, downloading, creating solutions and uploading these back to Learning Central. All students should attempt this before the start of the exam period.
▪ Support with completing your exam and submitting solutions is only available during
Q02
A
4