Clarifications 2025/2026 ================================================== Q. Do I have to have had my work marked and ticked off by the submission deadline? A. No, you only need to have submitted by the submission deadline. Any marking feedback you've received in advance of the deadline makes no difference. Q. What does 'substantially correct' mean? A. It means that, taken over all of the components required, a large fraction of the submission is correct. The results generated might not match perfectly with the expected answers, but the submission should demonstrate a basic level of competence with the material being examined. Q. I have missed the deadline for the tick by a couple hours - for which I am very sorry and cannot find out how to actually upload the completed zip file on the moodle VPL page. Is it because I missed the deadline? A. I think it has been closed at the deadline to make a 'mark in the sand' but it should be reopened this evening, and people should continue to submit and resubmit. Some people have extensions anyway. The key test the Examiner's will consider is whether a submission was substantially correct before the deadline. Q. I have missed the deadline for the tick due to an illness - for which I am very sorry. Is an extension possible, e.g. for tomorrow? A. DJG writes "I am sorry to hear that. I believe you have to give notice in advance or get a letter from your Tutor afterwards. I do not make these decisions. teaching-admin@cst.cam.ac.uk should know." ================================================== Q. One of my questions does not give me the field names to use, however the instructions tell me to have the field names exactly how it is specified in the question. Can I take it to mean that I can use arbitrary field names? A. Any field names are then acceptable in this circumstance, but their order must be correct. ================================================== Q. To select people born in the first half of the 1970s surely I would need a column that contains the month/full date of birth of the person in question, but the movies.sqlite table for people only gives the year in which they were born. A. The 1970's refers to the decade 1970 to 1979. The predicate required does not need to involve the month since there are 10 years in a decade and that is an even number. ================================================== Q. My question is "Write a query that returns a sorted list, without repetitions, of films that featured three different actors who also appeared in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone". But, there are four actors who appeared in the Harry Potter movie. How should I identify which three of the four actors I should answer with? A. It should be any combination of those four (4 choose 3) of which there are four combinations. ================================================== Q. It was mentioned that there is a human element to marking of the Assessed Exercises, so if our answers were almost completely correct, say 80%, would there be an opportunity to still obtain full credit or is it something like a mark out of 3? A. All Assessed Exercises (ticks) in Parts Ia and Ib are marked on a 'tick' basis. The tick is either awarded or not. [Your DoS should have explained that to you.] Fractional scores, like 80% are not possible. There are two Database ticks. The Moodle submission system for the Database Assessed Exercises records a score of 0.5 for an uploaded answer that has the correct contents. A human ticker (often me) then awards the tick in the next few days. Moodle may finally be updated to show 1.0 but the main marking feedback is through automatic edits to the starter pack worksheet. Your DoS can also see the master table of ticks. The advertised deadline for the Exercise is a submission deadline. The marking may take place after the deadline. Provided a substantially correct/complete submission was made before the deadline, final resubmissions can be made after the deadline. ================================================== Q. 2024/25: A question wants me to get the person_ids of all the actors who've played roles with the names of "Alice" or "Andrew". Does it want me to just get the characters with one of those names exactly or the character with those as their first or only names? A. I can see the expected answer checks for one of those situations, but the tick would likely be awarded for your alternative interpretation since the question is somewhat vague. ================================================== Q. 2024/25 I am attempting to submit the required zip file for tick 1 to the moodle page, however, my submission is failing the file validation. A. Sorry. Yes, I noticed that. You are not alone. The blank error report is my fault and the underlying error arises from an umlaut encoding. I've changed the checker to be less pedantic now. e.g. Atli Örvarsson has an umlaut. =>>Error with file "DBQ1.txt" --- the error is: Possibly a binary file has been submitted when UTF-8/ASCII was requested. =>>Submitted file validated successfully: DBQ1.sql. ================================================== END