Ah, a gripe. There’s something new in the world of blogging.

Anyway — one of my classes had an assignment; part of the assignment was (this’ll be technical and senseless, but trudge through it) “decompose the relation into a BCNF form that preserves all dependencies.”

That was the entire question. One of them I noticed could not be done as such — it could be reduced to BCNF, it could keep all its dependencies, but not both. “Oh dearie me!” I said, quietly, to myself, “whatever should I do in reguards to this conundrum?” I just put the BCNF decompisition figuring neither way is a whole answer.

Apparently, I was supposed to put “impossible to do.” So I made a gentle recommendation that in the future, should impossibility be a possibility, they simply add the phrase “if possible” onto the question somewhere. Heck, add it on even if all of them are possible.

The TAs response was, more or less, I’m stupid if I didn’t realize I should write that and that constructive suggestions are not welcome unless you want your head cutoff and all future assignments graded with a sharp bias.

And now I have to go to that class for some more learning. Fun.