When i design databases for uni cworks i tend to design my ERD and then attempt to normalise but the design is normally always in 3rd normal form. Is this because the problems are trivial and not that difficult or is it that i'm making mistakes with my method of designing.

My understanding is that normalisation is a technique for spotting mistakes in the design stages?

This is always a problem when trying to produce documentation to support c works in that the normalisation section is always of limited contents.

Don't worry - this just means that you are naturally good at database design! Normalisation is really just formalised common sense, so a good database designer tends to get it right first time without any formal normalisation stage.

If that causes a problem with your class work, then I guess you'll just have to purposely denormalise your ERD a bit first!