Apologies for the rant I previously posted (which I see has now been culled), but frustration with this ongoing situation regarding very obvious flaws in what are supposed to be reliable guidance documents has gone off the scale with me.
I would take the approach of designing the forms only before giving them the populated database – designing meaning get them to create a wireframe sketch or something similar as opposed to using the ‘Design View’ in Access – and ignore the request to create the forms at this stage as it is impossible!
I totally get your frustration though – we were verified last year for N4 AV and had our sample ‘not accepted’ because all our pupils had followed the task exactly as it was written in the documentation and imported a supplied spreasheet file into their database package which had therefore created the field design for them based on the data types in the supplied spreadsheet. They had ‘planned’ the field names and types previously though, but it wasn’t accepted as they hadn’t then physically implemented that plan within the ‘Design View’ of Access. I argued that this was unfair as the task itself failed to assess an outcome they were allegedly looking for, and presented the chief verifier with their own documentation as evidence.
The decision was reversed, but the task was changed this year so that candidates have to implement a much smaller database (thus eliminating the requirement for a pre-supplied file), so an obvious flaw in an assessment was only corrected because a centre fought back against a decision that initially went against them because their candidates took a piece of SQA documentation at face value, and stood to be penalised as a result.
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