RutSum

CBSE Computer Science Paper 2008

When I was looking at the previous years papers before the computer science exam, I felt that the paper had been easy since quite a lot of years, so this year CBSE would be planning a shock for us, and would throw questions at us which were totally out of the world. That scared me a bit, because I had started studying for the paper just a day before the actual exam, and I hadn’t really paid attention to data structures and boolean algebra during the academic year. There was a time when I was quite into programming and computer science, but that was the past, and now I know that I’m just too impatient to sit down, think and code.

When I arrived at my examination center that morning, my friends told me that we had only one set in computer science. This was good news, doing co-operative work never hurts anybody . The code for the paper was 91/1.

Surprisingly, the paper looked as easy as all the other previous year papers I had seen, at the first look. The output question was a bit tricky, but I got the answer after a little speculation. All the coding part was easy, but I’m sure that I would have left in a few syntactical or logical errors.

My answer to the first output question was (question 1 part d) -

Nnd@*Xrk!*

And for the second output question, my answer was (question 1 part e) -

[1]=10&15
[2]=21&13
[1]=11&16
[2]=22&14

What was shocking that the CBSE Computer Science paper had errors! I spotted 3 of them. For being safe, I mentioned the error in the answer sheet, and then said that if this error was corrected, the output would be ______.

1) In the first output question (question 1 part d), at a few places, the index of the array was placed in parenthesis () instead of square brackets [].

2) In the SQL output question (question 5 part b sub-part (v)), the question mentioned an attribute Address, which does not exist. I assumed that they were talking about City, and wrote the output for that.

3) Again, in the SQL output question (question 5 part b sub-part (vii)), no attribute named ManufacturerName existed. I changed it to ProductName, and gave the output.

These were errors confirmed by friends, but I found another ambiguous situation . In the question on 2D arrays (question 3 part d), it was mentioned that we had to take only the 2D array as the parameters for the function. Displaying the products of each column would be a difficult task without passing the dimensions of the array as arguments to the function. I did this question by assuming it was a 3×4 array, as was mentioned in the illustration given below the question. Probably this was a stupid move, but I couldn’t figure out how else to determine the size of a 2D integer array.

So in all, the paper was not very difficult, just a few mistakes. I am expecting a score of above 60, out of the maximum 70 marks.

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