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The Oral Exam Rationale

• The exam questions should cover all the activities of SENG4921 this semester.
• Adequate preparation for the examination requires a significant coverage of the lectures and the content of the seminar topics and discussions.
• Each student has an opportunity to prepare their own question.
• The examination format attempts to give a wide base to this assessment, even though the actual assessment session will be very short. We think this makes this a good assessment instrument.
• By revealing questions 2 & 3, and the basis for question 1, it is hoped that the stress of this type of assessment is minimised. The only unknowns in this exam are the actual questions to be answered in questions 2 & 3.

Student Identification

Your UNSW student card will be used for student identification.

Make sure you bring it with you.

The Oral Exam Format

The oral examination for each student will be scheduled as 15 minutes within a 20 minute slot. There will be three (3) questions; each question to be answered in 5 minutes. The three questions will be as follows:

Question 1: free choice

Each student should prepare a topic of their own free choice concerned with some aspect of software, hardware, IT professional issues or ethics. This could be —but does not have to be— based on, or derived from, the discussions, seminars, debates, student run seminars and lectures given this semester. The question should not overlap with the other two questions. At the examination the student will be asked to present his/her topic and discussion.

Type of question:

the question title should be concise and clearly identify the subject of the question. The question should be specific, rather than broad or general in nature, and it must contain moral and ethical issues. See the guidelines on What makes a good answer for more guidance on how to prepare your free choice question.

The purpose of the free choice question:

to demonstrate that you can choose a topic that is related to some ethical or professional issue(s) and develop arguments that reason about the issue(s).

Restrictions on choice of Question 1

• We are interested in how you develop the bases for your arguments rather than the arguments themselves. That is, we are interested in an ”original” development.
• We acknowledge that originality is a difficult concept to assess, so simply to make that task easier we rule out topics that were used in seminar activities in which you were involved with other students, and where it wold be difficult to impossible to determine originality.
• Overlap with lecture or seminar topics will also be discussed at the exam, and significant overlap will result in the conflicting lecture or seminar question being eliminated from the choice for questions 2 or 3.

Conflict with other exam questions:

if the free choice question deals directly with one of the Seminar or Lecture questions, then the conflicted question will generally be eliminated from the set of possible questions for question 2 or 3. Note carefully that the elimination occurs after the random choice, not before.

Cases where there is partial overlap with Seminar or Lecture questions will be discussed with the student by the examiners.

Repeat of material prepared for the debate, student seminar or essay topics:

apparent significant overlap of the free-choice question and the student’s debate, student seminar, or essay topics may be questioned by the examiners and the mark may be reduced by 40%.

Question 2: Based on Seminars

A discussion of one question chosen randomly from a set of questions on the seminar discussion topics.

Question 3: Based on Lectures

A discussion of one question chosen randomly from a set of questions on the lectures.

Question choice

The question for questions 2 & 3 will be chosen as follows:

1. For each of questions 2 and 3, three (3) question numbers will be drawn randomly (from a deck of cards) by the student.
2. One of the three questions is chosen by the student, or
3. All three questions are rejected and the student chooses another three questions and answers one question for half marks. The second draw is from the cards remaining after the first choice.

Rules

• The timing of the examination is critical; answers must not be longer than 5 minutes. There will be a visible timer, reset to 5 minutes before each answer. It is your responsibility to monitor the timer.

  Answers longer than 5 minutes will be cut short.

  …but conversely it is not sensible to finish with 2 minutes or more remaining.

• It must be emphasised that this exam is an oral exam and will be assessed accordingly. The exam is not a discussion or question and answer activity. During the answering of questions, the only person talking will be the student. You are talking to the examiners, so occasional eye contact is a good idea.
• There will be two examiners and each examination will be recorded. The recording is not used to mark the exam answers; it is used only if some issue is raised about the exam. Generally, the recording is never consulted.

Material allowed in the exam

• Electronic devices, such as iPads, phones, etc are not permitted in the examination.
• Students may bring notes or cards into the examination.
• However, while answering each question students may consult only a single sheet of paper, or card containing prompts. This, of course, can be a different sheet of paper/card for each question.
• The examiners may ask to see the material being used by a student during the examination.
• The answer must not be read. Completely read answers will not be considered satisfactory and the mark reduced by 40%.

Remember that this is an oral exam, not a reading test. As far as possible you should try to talk to the examiners, and while you can use notes to prompt you, you should not read an essay.

What makes a good answer?

The examiners will be looking for:

• clear identification of the issues;
• analysis of the professional and/or ethical consequences;
• careful presentation of the outcomes.

There are no correct answers, but a good answer will give a clear indication of consequences and issues.

A good answer will draw on lessons learnt from lectures, seminars and discussion during the semester.

Q1: Free choice

Q2: Seminar Questions

1. 1. Give a description of what is generally understood by “Engineering” as a profession.
   2. Present arguments for why Software Engineering may and may not claim to be an engineering profession.
   3. Where does Computer Science fit in the above?
   4. Give your own resolution of the arguments in 1b and 1c above.
2. Select any case studied this semester and analyse the chosen case according to either the ACM, or the IEEE/ACM SE codes of ethics. Your analysis should clearly illustrate how the chosen code relates to the chosen case.
3. Discuss the technical, professional and ethical issues raised by the Therac 25 case. Your answer must identify and discuss real technical issues, especially those involved in the development and use of the Therac-25, with particularly the actions of
   1. AECL’s management;
   2. AECL’s engineers;
   3. medical staff.
4. Briefly present John Rawls’ ethical principles as developed in his Theory of Justice.

   Rawls has suggested that his Theory of Justice can be seen as a contract theory on the rights and obligations of all parties affected by some enterprise. (Not completely Rawl’s words).

   Discuss Rawl’s categorisation of rights and obligations and illustrate using the Therac 25 case, or any other case studied this semester.

5. Therac 25 and Ariane 5:

   The Ariane 5 disaster is often described as a software failure.

   Critically evaluate that description and also discuss the concept of a “reuse error” that could be applied to both Ariane 5 and Therac 25. Draw up brief guidelines on what needs to be done if reuse, especially code-reuse, is to be adopted in a software project.

6. Summarise the facts in the Killer Robot story and then discuss the organisational and development process issues that led to the accident.
7. Give arguments both for and against patents —both general and software patents. You may base your arguments on the paper, Against intellectual property, or any other source that presents for/against IP arguments.
8. Dataveillance: Describe the two types of data surveillance, give three examples and then give an overview of the relevant professional and ethical issues for engineering professionals.

   Discuss the issues that arise from the extensive dataveillance capability now available through the extensive —almost ubiquitous— internet coverage.

Q3: Lecture Questions

1. Stephen Cohen: Theoretical Underpinnings of Ethics formerly known as Introduction to Ethics and Moral Reasoning: A Practical Framework

   Discussion of this choice should concentrate on the underpinnings of ethical reasoning. Choose two different ethical reasoning frameworks and demonstrate how these could lead to different decisions.

2. Stephen Cohen: Professionalism and ethical responsibilities

   Discussion of this choice should present key ethical principles that distinguish professional principles and responsibilities.

   Stephen Cohen discussed two different classes of ethical theories: deontology and utilitarianism.

   Discuss the difference between the two classes of ethical theories and show how they inform professional codes of ethics and codes of conduct.

   Illustrate by references to actual codes of recognised professional societies.

3. Ken Robinson: Ariane 5 Disaster

   Give a general overview of the facts in the Ariane 5 disaster and then discuss the professional and/or ethical ideas raised. In particular, discuss those ideas that differentiate Software Engineering aspects of the case from general engineering and project management aspects to give a balanced analysis of what went wrong.

4. Brendan Scott: The Hows, Whys and Wherefores of Open Source - Open source as a market reaction to regulation of the software industry

   Discuss Scott’s contrasting of copyright and patents with open-source as means of developing innovation in the software industry.

   Discussion of this choice should cover the historical development of markets and the economic arguments for controlling different types of markets.

5. David Vaile: Legal perspectives on system development – Liability, litigation risk, ‘professional’ standards, and ethics.

   Discuss and give examples of the social, professional and legal aspects of society’s attempts to deal with the development, use and misuse of software.

   Your answer should cover contract law and the consequences for you as an implementor of software.

6. Stuart Irvine & Charles Yip (Freehills Patent & Trade Mark Attorneys) Intellectual Property: the asset of the 21st century

   Discuss the patenting process and how it is being applied to patent software. Consider the arguments for and against the use of software patents and the possible impacts of software patents on the computing industry.

7. Peter Ho: Introduction to Law and Contracts

   Give an overview of the elements necessary in the formation of a legal contract. Then discuss how contracts are formed when it comes to internet commerce (e-commerce) and what happens to the enforceability of these contracts when things go wrong.

8. Wayne Wobcke: Risk Assessment in Sociotechnical Systems
   1. What is a sociotechnical system?
   2. Describe some of the difficulties involved in implementing an IT workflow system in a complex organizational context.
   3. Outline several methods for assessing the risk associated with any workflow requiring quality control (whether or not the workflow uses an IT system).
   4. Using the hospital in-patient transfer scenario for illustration, explain in general terms why adding steps to an existing workflow (such as may be implemented using an IT system) may not lead to improved compliance with quality control guidelines.
9. Peter Ho Torts and where we are at in Cyberspace.

   There is a growing trend towards storing your personal and business data in the “cloud” and there is an implicit presumption that data that is in the cloud is inheritently safe—but how safe is safe?

   In this question, you have been told by your cloud provider that they have had a catastrophic failure and they have lost all your data. Under Tort law, a number of elements (i.e. legal requirements) must be met before an complainant can mount a case. Discuss what those elements are and what your legal argument would be in order to meet those requirements. Assume that the Provider cannot rely on their service level agreement for protection.

10. David Vaile: Malware, Filtering and WiFi snooping

    Discuss and illustrate the social, ethical , technical and legal issues that have arisen in the development of the internet. Issues that can be referenced are hacking, spam, malware, WiFi snooping and others discussed in this lecture.