The final examination will cover the following material: Lauckner
and Lintner, Chapters 9 (on databases) and 15 (on ethical issues); Jeffry
Byrne, Easy Access 97 (you should be familiar with the material in the
introductions to the seven main sections of the book, and with the tasks
we carried out for the final lab assignment of the course); graphics programs,
especially Paint Shop Pro; spreadsheets, especially Microsoft Excel; and
databases, especially Microsoft Access.
Like the first two examinations, the final examination will contain
three main sorts of questions. First, there will be "objective" questions
-- true/false, multiple choice, fill in the blank, etc. These will
be taken from the questions in the text at the end of chapters 9 and 15,
or similar questions regarding Paint Shop Pro, Excel and Access.
Second, there will be short-answer questions that ask you to explain basic
ideas in your own words. Third, there will be essay questions asking
you to discuss some aspect of the course in more detail.
The questions at the end of each chapter provide good study material
for the "objective" questions.
Short-answer questions ("short" meaning something like a short
paragraph) will either be directly related to the key terms listed at the
end of our chapters, or will ask basic questions about the software listed
above.
Possible short-answer questions: I might ask basic terminological
questions, for example: what are hacking, cracking, software piracy,
viruses, trojan horses, salami-slicing, data-diddling, etc.; what is a
record, field, form, report, table, query, primary key, foreign key, etc.
I might ask about differences between important ideas, for example what
is the difference between data and information; what is the difference
between absolute and relative cell references in Excel, how are they expressed,
and under what conditions would you want one or the other; what is the
difference between a flat-file and a relational database. (Answer:
a flat-file database can extract information from only one table at a time;
a relational database can retrieve data from many tables at once.)
I might also ask you what some of the functions we have used in Excel do
or how they work (including SUM, COUNT, AVERAGE, MEDIAN, IF, AND, and VLOOKUP),
or give you a specific task and ask you to write a formula which accomplishes
that task (for example, a miniature version of the problem of converting
from numeric to alphabetic grades using the IF logical operator), or give
you an example of a formula using these functions and ask you what the
results of the formula will be. Similarly, I might reproduce the
design view of the Query window in Access, give you a query to accomplish,
and ask how you would fill in the items in the grid in order to find the
desired information.
Essay questions could include such questions as the following:
1. I might give you one of the ethical issues discussed in chapter
15 of our text, and ask you to write an essay in which you explain the
nature of the problem and some of the arguments on both sides, concluding
with a defense of your own position. (Ideally your essay would make
some use of our in-class discussion of utilitarian and Kantian approaches
to ethics.)
2. I might give you an example of something you might want to
use a database for, and ask you to design an appropriate database (e.g.
how many tables would you use, what fields would you include in each table,
how would you construct a query to find a subset of the information stored
in the database).
3. Similarly, I might give you some data and some information
to derive from the data, and ask you to design an Excel spreadsheet in
which to store the data and carry out the necessary calculations (including
writing the appropriate formulas).