Understanding Standards An Overview of Course Assessment Computing Science Higher An Overview of Course Assessment

What this presentation covers Mandatory skills, knowledge and understanding Question Paper Assignment Support materials

Mandatory skills, knowledge and understanding Progression from National 5 course Divided into four areas- Software design and development Computer systems Database design and development Web design and development Covering the five skills of Analysis Design Implementation Testing Evaluation

Mandatory skills, knowledge and understanding Software design & development Candidates can choose which design technique they use to represent the solution to a problem Parallel 1D arrays Pre-defined functions Create substrings Convert from character to ASCII and vice-versa Modulus Convert floating-point to integers

Mandatory skills, knowledge and understanding Computer Systems Conversion of 2’s complement form binary to denary Exemplification of floating-point representation of positive and negative numbers Environmental impact of intelligent systems Heating systems Traffic control Car management systems Computer Misuse Act

Mandatory skills, knowledge and understanding Database Design and development Entity-occurrence diagrams Designing a solution to a query SQL

Mandatory skills, knowledge and understanding Web design and development Design using wireframing Horizontal navigation bar, positioning of media, Form inputs HTML Form inputs and form data validation CSS Control appearance and positioning Create horizontal navigation bars Testing Usability testing using personas, test cases and scenarios Compatibility

Mandatory skills, knowledge and understanding - deletions Description of language types Virtual machines and emulators Video and audio representation and calculations Contemporary developments Accessibility of computer systems Compression techniques Description of the role of server sided scripting Technical Implementation – hardware, software, storage, networking RIPA Economic and social impact

Mandatory skills, knowledge and understanding - exemplification In order to support centres as to the depth of some areas of the course we have provided clarification as we did in National 5 This helps centres and assessment writers understand the depth required of topics This can be found in the document ‘Resources to support Higher Computing Science’

Course Assessment Approximate breakdown of content in Course Assessment: Software Design and Development – 40% Web Design and Development – 25% Database Design and Development – 25% Computer Systems – 10%

Course Assessment Approximate breakdown of skills in Course Assessment: Analysis – 5% Design – 30% Implementation – 40% Testing – 10% Evaluation – 5% Application of Computer Systems knowledge – 10%

Design Candidates will be expected to Design database queries Complete entity relationship and entity occurrence diagrams Read and understand two design techniques: Structure diagrams Pseudocode Design a solution to a problem using any recognised design technique Design web structures and pages

Implementation - writing code Writing code will be predominantly assessed in the assignment including: High level language programming SQL HTML & CSS Javascript Where code is asked to be written in the question paper there will be scaffolding which could be in the form of: Re-writing code Applying knowledge of standard algorithms to a context

Implementation - reading and explaining code in Question Paper Questions may involve reading and explaining code in: software design and development database design and development web design and development This may involve explaining what the code does finding errors in code

Course Assessment Both Assignment and Question Paper are designed to differentiate between candidates: Approximate ‘A’ type marks – 30% Approximate ‘C’ type marks – 50%

Question Paper 110 marks (69% of Course Assessment) Section1 – 25 marks – short response Section 2 – 85 marks – short and extended response 2.5 hours Specimen question paper available by September 2018

Assignment 50 marks (31% of Course Assessment) Externally Marked Consists of three separate tasks Software Design & Development (25 marks) Web Design & Development (10 – 15 marks) Database Design & Development (10 – 15 marks) Open Book with no assistance from teachers/lecturers 8 hours to complete Specimen assignment available by September 2018

Assignment Tasks will vary from year to year Will always include Programming in a high-level language Coding using SQL on pre-populated databases Coding using HTML & CSS which may be building on supplied HTML

Conditions of Assessment Timing Candidates have 8 hours to complete all three tasks 8 hours may be split into shorter sessions but centres must ensure that tasks/files do not leave the classroom percentages suggest that the time taken to complete each task should be approximately: SDD – 4 hours WDD – 2 hours DDD – 2 hours tasks may be completed in any order

Conditions of Assessment Supervision and Control It is the responsibility of centres and candidates to ensure that candidate’s work is their own. all candidates must be within direct sight of the teacher or lecturer throughout the session(s) e-mail and mobile phones must not be accessed candidates must complete their work independently (ie no group work is permitted) without interruption by targeted periods of learning and teaching

Course Support SQA and Education Scotland partnership to identify and develop support materials. Materials are signposted in the ‘Resources to Support Higher Computing Science’ document and hosted on Glow. https://glowscotland.sharepoint.com/sites/PLC/technologies/SitePages/Computing%20Science.aspx Teaching materials Online training resources Homework and Assessment tasks Online teaching materials for Web design & development

Course Support For further information, please visit the Higher Computing Science page at www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/56924.html Online CPD materials on SQL, HTML & CSS available on SQA Academy Multiple Choice Assessments - available on Quantum www.diagnosticquestions.com Author – SQA Computing Science

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