Questions about Web-based Reviews

This page is devoted to responses to students' questions about specific review questions and answers.

Q: I was wondering if there are part marks awarded for the multiple choice.

A: Unfortunately, the multiple-select questions are marked so that you get credit
for selecting correct answers and you're docked for selecting incorrect answers.
I wish the system were such that you'd get credit for selecting the correct answers
and get credit for not selecting incorrect answers, but the software does
not work this way. Thus, it is possible to get part marks. But it is also possible
to lose some of those part marks by also selecting incorrect options. (Note that I
can't simply give credit for correct options, or you could simply select
all options on all multiple-select questions, and get full credit.)

This is also why we have set the reviews so that they don't reveal how many
points are associated with each question - because such information would be
a hint as to how many of the selections are correct. What I will do, is I will
phrase the questions and set the answers so that half or more of the choices are
correct - to help avoid your earning a negative mark on any question. This means
that you'll need to read questions, especially grammar questions, carefully because
some questions will ask you to identify good sentences and others will ask you to
identify bad sentences.

Review 1

Q 4: Which type of engineer is most likely to produce energy-efficient motors

    Correct Answer:
    Mechanical

    Your Response:
    Electrical

In IPE, page 8, right at the bottom (last line) under the electrical engineer section "[,,,] such as generators and motors...". There is no mention of motors in the Mechanical section, even though the question was about energy-efficient motors, you can see why I am confused.

A: Yes, we should have accepted also "electrical" for this question. I'll ask Benoit to amend the reviews.

Q 18: The following sentence is stated as being a bad example of how to use commas - "Be warned that if you don't want to lose marks for poor grammar, don't rely on MS Word's grammar checker." The rule assumed to have been broken is at the top of page 96 in Bugs in Writing - "You should use commas around (that is, on both sides of) clauses inserted in the middle of a that remark." However, the implication of the rule is that a clause is inserted in the middle of an independent that remark, or that the remark will stand on its own without the clause. Using the example from the book, the sentence "I want you to know that, whatever happens, I will..." will still make sense when the inserted clause is removed - "I want you to know that I will..."

In Question 18, however, the sentence does not make sense if the clause is removed. Assuming the correct sentence should read, "Be warned that, if you don't want to lose marks for poor grammar, don't rely on MS Word's grammar checker," removing the clause produces, "Be warned that don't rely on MS Word's grammar checker," which is clearly not a proper sentence.

A: You are correct. We will remark the reviews to accept "true" as an answer to this question, as
the words that follow "that" in the question's sentence do not really qualify as a phrase in the
middle of a "that remark", as defined, by example, in the text.

Q 31: The word bus ends with 's' and the book said when the word has eez at the end, you just add the ' sign. So I don't understand why the answer isn't "false".

A: A word ending in 's' is not the same thing as a word ending with the sound
'eez'. "Bus" does not end with the sound 'eez', and when one speaks the
sentence, one says "bus's", so it gets the apostrophe s.

Q 33: The following sentence is a good example of how to use possessives.
Andrew's and Lisa's respective duties as Orientation organizers were equally demanding.

Correct Answer:
True

Bugs in writing, page 571, first line, "[...] When you are writing about two creatures who share ownership, you should form the possessive with only the second one." Hence why I thought the statement was incorrect usage of possessives.

A: The key phrase from the text is "shared ownership". If two creatures share ownership, then
you form the possessive by putting an apostrophe "s" only on the second subject. If the sentence
is about two creatures and their separate possessions, then you form the possessive by
putting an apostrophe "s" on both subjects.

Review 2

Q6: Question 6 asks for the product (8.0 ± 0.2)(5.0 ± 0.4). Using the method described in IPE (and last week's lecture), I found the uncertainty to be ± 10.5% of 40. The corresponding absolute uncertainty is ± 40 / (10.5 / 100) = ± 4.2. However, I do not understand why the answer B is correct. As far as I understand, B has two errors: the number 40.0 has 3 significant digits whereas the answer should only be expressed to 2 significant digits and the absolute uncertainty should be rounded to 1 digit because the first digit (4) is not a small number. The only problem with answer C is a subtle comment on its form from IPE page 130: "... the measured speed can be written as... 343.5 (1 ± 0.26%) m/s. The unit symbol % simply means the number 0.01 when used strictly... but the ambiguous notation 343.5 m/s ± 0.26% is often accepted." In lecture, you chalked the examples of relative uncertainty with the "ambiguous notation". Finally, the answer A is obviously incorrect. If I am right about A and B being incorrect and then why is B acceptable?

A: I blew it on this one. You all are correct in that answer B is unacceptable -- but not just because of the rule of thumb
described in IPE, which you all probably know from high-school science (i.e., that the number of significant digits in the
product of two numbers is the same that in the factor that has the least number of significant digits). The degree of uncertainty
is 4.2, which should be rounded to one significant digit: ± 4. This uncertainty, in turn, determines which digits in the
product are signficant -- that is, no digit beyond the unit place can be significant. Thus, the correct answer is 40± 4.

Answer C isn't much better than answer B, as the relative error still has too many signficant digits. But I can imagine
several students choosing it as the best answer, since none of the other options were any better, so we'll give credit for it.

The issue of how to format a measured, or computed, value with a relative error (IPE pg. 130) is an issue only when
stating both the value and its units of measure, but question 6 didn't have any units of measure.

Q 8, 10, 11: The question for all three of these questions is whether or not they have a
passive agent. Now, I answered false to all of them because none of them had a passive
agent in them; sure some of them are written in passive voice, but none of them (as
far as I'm concerned) contain passive agents (pg 2 of BUGS). It seems that the
answers were marked for their presence of passive voice instead of the
presence of a passive agent.

A: Yes, I should have asked whether the sentences had "passive or missing"
agents. We'll give credit for both answers on these three questions.

Q16: Where is the undefined this located in question 16?

A: The question asks about an "undefined this or related error". In this question,
it is a related error, in which the word "some" masquerades as a noun: "some argue",
as opposed to "some grammarians argue".

Review 3

Q 18: This question asks whether University of Waterloo, Software Engineering Work Report Guidelines, (Oct. 1, 2004); <http://www.softeng.uwaterloo.ca/Current/work_report_guidelines.htm> conforms to the IEEE standard for a web reference.

The IEEE website gives R. Bartle, "Early MUD History," Nov. 1990; www.ludd.luth.se/mud/aber/mud-history.html as an example of a correct website reference.

The reference in the question deviates in three ways from the IEEE example: the title of the web page is italicized instead of enclosed in quotations, there are brackets around the date, and there are angle brackets around the website address. Despite these differences, the answer to the question is given as True, indicating that it conforms to the IEEE format.

A: You're right that we should give credit for an answer of "false"
for question 18.

To use Dupré's BUGS classification, I would characterize the brackets
around the date and around the URL as "ugly" - technically correct, but
they clutter the reference. Also, italicizing the title would be OK if the
work-term-report guidelines were deemed a manual, rather than simply
a web page. However, because the guidelines document is probably
best considered a web-page publication, and because the
brackets are ugly and aren't used in any of the examples in the
IEEE guidelines, we will accept both "true" and "false" for this
question.

Q19: The quesiton asks if the reference adheres to
the IEEE format for a reference to a technical manual. However, from the
website linked from the se101 course webpage, the example given puts the
volume/edition number right after the title, seperated by a comma. In question
19, I beleive the answer should be false, because the edition number was put
after the publishing place. Could you would please looking into this question,
because the answer contradicts the IEEE reference style.

A: Yes, it is better if the edition appears before the publisher and before
the author's or publisher's location. We'll accept both "true" and "false"
for this question.