OCR make announcement about this years Computer Science paper (J277/02)

[Ditto]

Following online criticism about this years paper, OCR have made the following comments:

 

"Our aim is always to make sure students have a positive assessment experience and so it is disappointing some students found this to be a more challenging paper than they expected. We have also heard your feedback about the style of the paper.I appreciate how discouraging this may have been for you so I wanted to write to you directly to reassure you that getting to the right marks and grades is our top priority and explain what we’re doing to make sure the result you get is fair:• We’ll make sure the final mark scheme reflects the different approaches students have taken when answering questions. • When we set the grade boundaries, we will take into account any potential evidence that the paper is more time-consuming or more difficult than usual."

 

 

My son sat this paper and I recall him saying it was quite odd and lots of his peers struggled. He said there were no questions on CPU's, which supposedly was a definite based on past papers. He also said lots on binary manipulation, which whilst he was comfortable with it (strong at Maths), a lot of his peers were not.

 

Sounds as though the subject officer didn't get the balance of the paper quite right. As for the two bullet points, that's standard practice, but worth reminding worried parents and pupils about. What could cause a challenge, is if the paper is too much of an oddity, standards-based data from previous years might not be as robust as usual.

[Primus]

It's worth noting this statement is about paper 2 whereas CPUs and binary manipulation are paper 1.

 

Paper 2 was very very different to previous papers and had questions with errors.

[Ditto]

It's worth noting this statement is about paper 2 whereas CPUs and binary manipulation are paper 1.

 

Paper 2 was very very different to previous papers and had questions with errors.

 

Doesn't sound like they did a thorough job preparing the papers. I wonder if my sons comment on CPU's was paper 1 - haven't seen the paper. Unlike other sciences, there's no practical element either. The biggest worry is if it puts people of Computing in future, A' level or GCSE, as I believe it was starting to see some growth in entry number over the last few years.