Introduction practice questions.

Transport for London introduced the Oyster smartcard in 2003, and every journey validated with the card is recorded. Which group is a stakeholder in this system although its members never carry the card?

• Passengers who choose to top up the card at a ticket machine rather than online
• Commuters who register the card to a personal online account
• Bus drivers, whose shift patterns are redrawn from the recorded journey data
• Tourists who buy a Visitor Oyster card at the airport before travelling

Answer: Bus drivers, whose shift patterns are redrawn from the recorded journey data

A stakeholder is anyone who affects a digital system or is affected by it, so staff whose rosters are rebuilt from the journey data qualify even though they are not users. The other three options all describe people holding the card, which is the narrower category candidates default to.

In England the NHS e-Referral Service became mandatory for first outpatient referrals in 2018, replacing the remaining paper referral letters. Which statement describes an implication of the change rather than an impact?

• Referral letters no longer have to be printed and posted between clinics
• Access to a specialist now depends on the record system being available
• A patient can leave the surgery with an appointment slot already chosen
• A referral can be searched by keyword instead of read page by page

Answer: Access to a specialist now depends on the record system being available

The other three are impacts: immediate, intended effects of digitising the referral. Making access to care conditional on the booking system being up is a wider, structural consequence that nobody chose, which is what marks it as an implication.

A state school in the Netherlands buys software that flags pupils as at risk of leaving school early, using attendance records and marks. Which objection is the national data protection authority, rather than a class teacher, most likely to raise?

• The flags arrive too late in the term to change how a class is taught
• Teachers were given no training time in which to discuss a flagged pupil with the family
• The list of flagged pupils is too long for one form tutor to act on
• Under the GDPR, the data was collected for registration and marking, not for prediction

Answer: Under the GDPR, the data was collected for registration and marking, not for prediction

A regulator's mandate is the lawfulness of the processing, and reusing data gathered for registration to predict a pupil's future engages the GDPR's purpose limitation principle. The three distractors are real objections, but they belong to the teaching stakeholder group, which is exactly the distinction the question tests.

In a district survey, 97 per cent of households have a broadband connection at home, yet only 38 per cent of adults have ever completed a transaction with the council online. Which reading of the two figures is best supported?

• Access has largely been solved and the remaining barrier is skills and confidence
• The survey must have counted mobile-only households twice, because the two figures cannot both be correct as they stand
• Coverage in the district is still the main obstacle to using the council's online services
• Adults in the district use paper channels because they distrust the council's website

Answer: Access has largely been solved and the remaining barrier is skills and confidence

A gap of this size sits on the second level of the digital divide, where the connection exists but skills, confidence and usable design do not. Reading every access figure as the whole story is the standard error, because it makes an unused service look like a delivery success.

A city can raise the accuracy of its housing-benefit fraud checks only by reviewing more claims by hand, and the review budget is fixed, so every extra check is taken from somewhere else. What does the course call a relationship of this kind?

• A trade-off, because more of one valued outcome can be had only with less of another
• A dilemma, because the city cannot tell which of the two datasets is the more accurate
• An implication, because the effects reach beyond the people the decision addresses
• An impact, because the decision produces a measurable change in how quickly claims are settled by the city

Answer: A trade-off, because more of one valued outcome can be had only with less of another

The city can buy more accuracy only by giving up review capacity elsewhere, so more of one valued outcome costs less of another: that is a trade-off. A dilemma, the most tempting distractor, is a choice between courses of action that each breach something the decider is committed to.

UK supermarkets rolled out self-service checkouts widely from the late 2000s. Queues move faster at quiet times, and over the following decade entry-level cashier posts, often a first job, became scarcer. Which statement applies the course vocabulary correctly?

• both changes are implications, because both follow from the rollout
• faster queues are an implication, because shoppers value the time saved
• faster queues are an impact and the loss of entry-level posts is an implication
• the loss of posts is an impact, because the tills were installed to reduce staffing

Answer: faster queues are an impact and the loss of entry-level posts is an implication

An impact is the direct, usually immediate effect of a system; an implication is the wider or longer-term consequence for stakeholders, here young workers seeking a first job. The common error is to sort by intention: directness and reach make the distinction, so even a foreseen change in the job market counts as an implication.