COMM 226 Concordia: where do students lose the most marks?

Direct answer: COMM 226 is a 3-credit undergraduate course from Concordia's Department of Supply Chain and Business Technology Management in the John Molson School of Business. The course description asks how digital tools and the digitization of processes can create business value, solve business problems and drive competitive advantage.

The eConcordia page lists a Fall term from 8 September to 7 December 2026 and a Winter term from 11 January to 12 April 2027. It also lists the textbooks: Kroenke and McKinney's Processes, Systems, and Information (4th edition, published by Pearson) and the open pressbook Information systems for business and beyond by Roch, Fowler, Smith and Bourgeois. The material fee of $154.73 CAD was the figure on the live page on 31 October 2026, so quote the fee from the page, not from a forum.

The eConcordia page lists COMM 210 or COMM 211 as the prerequisite, and it also excludes students who have already taken certain other courses. The 2025 to 2026 BTM flowchart shows COMM 211 alongside COMM 226, and this guide could not confirm from the flowchart text whether that is a prerequisite or a co-requisite. Confirm the prerequisite in your course outline before you register.

Confirm in your course outline: contact hours, exam length, assessment weights, assignment deadlines and the software list for your term. This guide could not verify any of them.

Direct answer: The mistakes that cost marks are the advanced constructs, not the entity boxes. Rashkovits and Lavy (2021) analysed final-exam entity-relationship diagrams from 65 second-year management information systems students, and the failure rates for the less obvious constructs were above 80%.

Their sample was a second-year information systems class, which is close to the position of a COMM 226 student, though not the same course. 45 students (70%) completed the strong entities correctly. Then the results fell away: 53 (83%) missed reflexive relationships, 51 (80%) missed ternary relationships, and 32 of those had used two binary relationships in place of one ternary link. A further 56 students (88%) missed the weak entity, and 55 (86%) failed the hierarchies. The authors also interviewed 10 of the students, and their abstract states that "novice designers encounter difficulties in understanding and implementing such models" (Rashkovits & Lavy, 2021).

The practical reading is that a diagram which looks complete can still be wrong. Before you submit, ask four questions about each relationship in the case: can an entity relate to itself (reflexive), do three entities depend on each other at once (ternary), can a record not exist without its parent (weak), and is there a type and subtype (hierarchy)? A page of answers to those four questions is a better self-check than a page of redrawing.

Direct answer: A good assumption is one sentence, placed beside the choice it explains, that names the business rule the case leaves open and states what your design does because of it. No published rubric for COMM 226 was found, so the example below shows MAAS practice, not a Concordia marking guide.

Take a case about a clinic where patients book appointments with doctors. The case does not say whether a patient may see more than one doctor. Write: "Assumption: a patient can have many appointments and a doctor can have many appointments, so an Appointment entity links them, and each appointment has one patient and one doctor." If your course outline or case text later settles the question, delete the sentence; if it does not, the sentence shows your marker that the choice was deliberate.

For process maps, the research on novices adds a caution about how you draw. Recker, Safrudin and Rosemann (2012) studied business process management students and identified five process design archetypes, from textual through hybrid to graphical, according to their abstract. They reported that the quality of the designs decreased as the use of graphics increased, and that hybrid designs combining text labels with abstract graphical forms appeared well suited to describing business processes. MAAS's practical reading is that a map built from standard shapes with a short text label on every step is the safer choice, and that a map decorated with icons and no labels is not.

Direct answer: COMM 226 is a gateway. The 2025 to 2026 BTM major flowchart lists it as a prerequisite for BTM 380, 382, 387, 430 and 440, so a weak foundation here is carried into five later courses, including the modelling habits that those courses build on.

Most pages that currently rank for the code describe the course in isolation. They do not say that the ERD and process-modelling habits you build now are the habits that BTM 380, 382, 387, 430 and 440 expect you to bring.

Because the flowchart is the only official source we could read for this link, treat the list of five courses as the 2025 to 2026 plan and not a promise for your intake. Keeping your own notation notes from this course is the cheapest way to avoid relearning them later.

A student who treats the course as a hurdle to clear with minimum effort may pass and then struggle in BTM 380 or BTM 382. A student who keeps the diagrams from this course, with their assumption sentences, has a revision file for the later ones. Check the flowchart for your own entry year, since requirements change between calendar years.

Direct answer: Technology acceptance research gives you evidence for why people adopt or reject a system, which is the kind of reasoning a business technology course asks for. Two meta-analyses are worth knowing, and both support the idea that the established models hold up across many studies.

King and He (2006) pooled 88 published studies and, as reported in their abstract, concluded that the technology acceptance model is "a valid and robust model". A much later review by Marikyan, Papagiannidis and Stewart (2023) covered 693 papers. They identified 21 independent predictors of attitude, intention and use, and found evidence of publication bias toward significant results, though no evidence of p-value manipulation.

Single-institution studies agree. Yeou (2016) reported that the technology acceptance model "is still a solid theoretical model whose validity can extend to blended learning settings" in a Moodle study, and that computer self-efficacy and perceived usefulness mattered most for attitude and usage. Hamid et al. (2020) tested 98 students on a Business Information Systems module in Brunei and found the original findings supported.

Use them as a method, not as decoration. When a case describes staff refusing a new system, name the likely predictors (perceived usefulness, ease of use) and say which fact in the case supports each. That is more convincing than quoting a model name, and it keeps the answer tied to the business problem. Which models your lecturer expects is a confirm in your course outline item.

Direct answer: Study by retrieval and plan around the outline, since this guide could not verify the exam format or the weights. Close the textbook, write questions from each lesson heading, answer them after a gap and keep a list of the misses.

Pick the topics from your lesson list, not from a forum thread, because a mock exam from another year or school can test chapters your section never taught. For each modelling topic, redraw one diagram from a blank page and compare it against the four ERD questions above. For each theory topic, write one case-based paragraph that applies a model to a business problem. A longer treatment of spaced practice is in how to revise for final exams effectively.

Confirm in your course outline: which assessments are individual and which are group, what the late penalty is, and whether the final must be passed on its own.

Direct answer: You can get help understanding methods, but each submission must be your own work, or your group's work where the task is a group one. MAAS mentors guide students through their own work in stages (Outline, Draft, Final), and the student stays involved at each stage.

Academic integrity is not an abstract risk here. Concordia publishes its Academic Code of Conduct on the same page that lists the penalties, and a diagram you cannot explain aloud is the first thing a marker questions.

A legitimate session looks like this: you bring an ERD you drew, explain each relationship aloud, and are asked what would break if a patient had two doctors. You then redraw it yourself. Concordia's academic integrity page names the Academic Code of Conduct as the university's official policy, so work you did not do yourself puts you at risk. Search results for the code also include ready-made answer sets, and using them leaves you unpractised on exactly the constructs that the 65-student study shows are hard.

Direct answer: Nine studies put numbers on how business and information systems students learn modelling, SQL and technology acceptance, from 56 to 1,237 participants. They differ from COMM 226 in country, level and course, so read them as pointers for where to practise.

The table shows what each study reports.

Source: the studies linked in the table, read 2026-11-02. Details are those in the published abstracts.

Direct answer: The three recurring mistakes are skipping advanced constructs, collapsing a three-way link into two pairs, and drawing a process map with icons and no labels. Each maps to a published finding, and you can check all three in about fifteen minutes before you submit your work.

First, skipping advanced constructs. Rashkovits and Lavy (2021) report 53 of 65 students (83%) missing the reflexive relationship, so look for any entity that points back to itself, such as an employee who manages other employees.

Second, collapsing a three-way link. In the same study 32 students replaced a ternary relationship with two binary ones. Here is a MAAS illustration, not a Concordia case and not research data. In a clinic, an Appointment links a Patient, a Doctor and a Room at once. If you draw Patient to Doctor and Doctor to Room, you can no longer tell which patient used which room with which doctor, and the question "who was in Room 3 at 10:00?" has no answer in your diagram.

Third, decorating without labelling. Recker, Safrudin and Rosemann (2012) found that the quality of designs decreased as the use of graphics increased. Use standard shapes from BPMN and write a short label on every step.