We had a subject called Informatics Practices as a part of our school syllabus which included Visual Basic and SQL programming. Most of the students passed the exams by memorizing the code snippets instead of understanding them. I believe that its easy to score in this subject by just understanding a few basic stuff.
In this series of posts I’ll take up some most commonly asked problems in examinations and give an in-depth review of all the steps involved.
In this post I explain the sequence of steps to be followed to make the programming smooth and to maximize scoring in exams.
- Create the skeleton first. The skeleton is a working program upon which we are going to build our program. Its the basic outline(syntax) of the procedure, function or whatever is asked. Make sure that the skeleton is able to take inputs and display an output. This step is critical as it usually carries 1/4 to 3/4 of the total marks of that question.
- Understand the Logic. Now that we have a program that takes inputs and gives an output we need to find a process that the input must undergo for us to get the desired output. For this understanding the logic of the program is important. You may require penning down your ideas for this.
- Translate the logic by the means of the programming language. After having understood the logic its time to get down to the dirty stuff. You need to translate your logic/ideas by the means of the programming language(Visual Basic or SQL). This is the step where all your programming knowledge comes in handy.
- Testing. Testing is easy if you are doing practicals. But if you are writing an exam on paper it can become a little tricky. First try and detect and eliminate syntax errors. Then, take up any value for the input and then go with the flow, try and understand the changes that the variable undergoes and see to it that they are as desired, check the semantics.
Additional tip to maximize scoring:
- Comment. Comments help in making your program more readable. It also enhances your scoring, so make sure you comment whenever possible.
