(17-06-2010, 08:34 AM)cgallafant Wrote: One of two questions set at the York Study Group May session. Any comments would be gratefully received and used at the June session.
A railway is introducing a new cab signalling system. Under normal operation there is no requirement for lineside infrastructure for the purposes of signalling the train or advising the driver of any restrictions or limits (any relevant information will be available in the cab). The
railway has very demanding operating requirements and the provision of signalling equipment for degraded operation is being considered.
Give three examples of events that could lead to degraded operation. [3 marks]
What factors may influence the provision of equipment to support degraded operation ? [5 marks]
How could the equipment for degraded operation be designed and controlled? [5 marks]
How can technical and operational performance and safety risks associated with infrequent use of the degraded mode equipment be managed? [7 marks]
How can the cost effectiveness of the degraded mode provision be assessed? [5 marks]
I am not going to be able to respond in this degree of detail regualrly but in this case I felt it was worth it. Well done to this Study Group for having students that come up with the goods- we have 4 reasonable answers to the same interesting question so I think it is informative to do a compare and contrast. In the attachment I have gone through the question by section with a column for each answer, made an assessment of what I would score it and tried to explain the thinking that lead me to that. Where i felt that no answer had adequately addressed an issue I also added a few thoughts of my own in that section heading.
Note that i am not an examiner and have no inside info re how they mark; just a view of how I would approach it. I think that i am probably not far off. It is all a bit subjective, but they say that too- it sounds wrong but it is the only way it can be and i hope that sharing the thoughts I had when marking these, you can begin to see how an examiner approaches, balancing what is written against the question (rather than any pre-conceived notion of what "THE ANSWER" is- the whole point is that there is NOT one answer, so no tick list can be made to work. Also the examiner always has to be assuming what the candidate meant by any words and has to use all information holistically to get a view of the persons level of comprehension rather than purely going on marks- I have endeavoured to explain my thought process on this and the judgements that are needed.
It is commonly said that the earliest marks in the question are the easiest and a bit of a "warm up"; it is your chance to define the context for how you are going to answer the remainder; I don
PJW