T224 - Must be clear!

Good news! Got my first TMA back for T224. Grumpy news - lost points for not being clear. Well, when I say 'not being clear' what I really mean is that 'it was not clear enough for the OU marking scheme'. See what you make of this - and if you think it isn't clear then please tell me. The question told us that we had a display panel with three 7-segment LED's on board. We had to write out the bit pattern that would be held in the 3 bytes that represent the pattern that will be displayed on the LED's. The pattern we were asked to use was '-05'. Note: This is not asking for the binary representation of -05, but for the representation that causes the correct segments in a 7-segment display to light up to display -05.

So in my answer I put: 00010000 11101110 11010110

Now, as it happens, that is the correct answer (hoorah!) ... so you may be wondering why I lost marks...Well, believe it or not, its because I did not make it clear which of those bit patterns was the first byte, which was the second, and which was the third. I lost a mark for each.

The moral of this story is that its not good enough just to get the answer technically correct, you actually have to make it very, very clear.

Its easy to forget that Universities are not real life and that this kind of thing is a requirement. In my professional life I have written countless lines of assembler code, and have had to work with colleagues doing the same - and I can guarantee that every one of those people would have understood that the first 8 bits referred to the first byte, the second 8 bits to the second byte, and the third 8 bits to the third byte.

If I am wrong, then you can call me Aunt Madge.