So I went to work on putting up the concurrent software design question from 2004. The first subpart of the question is, "What is safety?" The problem with this is the word safety is overloaded. The definition in the book Concurrent Programming in Java by Lea and the book Software Engineering by Sommerville take two different angles to discussing this answer. Sommerville talks about safety critical systems will Lea talks about safety in software mainly as it pertains to synchronization of objects. Both are correct but the definition that you take for safety build in a dependency for the example you need to provide. Granted the question is in the Concurrent Software Design section but that really can be applied to both types of answers. So I deem this a trick question. I would expect that every subpart of this question will have issues like that. The grader will need special knowledge to answer each parts. This question cannot be scripted. On the last test I wrote down the exact words from the Concurrent Programming in Java but gave an example for the Sommerville book. It was wrong or so my adviser said when we reviewed it. I am kind of upset that they cannot make the question more clear about what kind of answer they want. So I have written the answer both ways and they can pick which one they want.

This is pretty much my last question from the pertinent test that I have. I have a great deal of test way back to I think 1992 or 1993. These tests are not even in the form of the other tests. I don`t take them seriously. I am only looking at the tests that are consistent. The test questions that are consistent vary a bit from year to year but have similar attributes. Some questions on some years have more or less subparts. I tried to do something that was representative of both if I could.

Off to my swim.