Advanced Higher Computing Science

We’ve updated the coursework assessment task for the Advanced Higher Computing Science project.

We’ve made the following changes in response to feedback from practitioners and the projects submitted last session:

• Removed the two project options that combine software design and development, and web design and development. Very few learners completed these types of projects and, when they did, they often struggled to provide the evidence required.
• Reviewed the requirements of the remaining project options to ensure a comparable level of demand and volume of evidence. Each project will now have four functional requirements that relate to Advanced Higher concepts, and three of which will relate to integration. We’ve updated the 'mandatory requirements' and examples on pages 16-19.
• Limited the scope of projects by requiring learners to identify between four to eight additional functional requirements. Now, if learners include more than eight additional functional requirements, or six end-user requirements, SQA markers will apply a penalty.
• Reviewed the instructions to candidates in the testing stage to clarify what is required.
• Removed the 'evidence checklists' and detailed stage-by-stage instructions for learners as these will be contained in four new templates that will be published soon. It’ll be mandatory for learners to use the appropriate template for the project they are completing. The template will be pre-populated with functional requirements for Advanced Higher concepts and integration for that project type. It will also have prompts for the specific evidence required for the design and implementation stages for that project type.

We’ve updated the course specification to reflect these changes.

The coursework assessment task and the course specification are available from the 'Coursework' and 'Course Specification' sections on the Advanced Higher Computing Science web page.

We’ll confirm in SQA News when the templates are published.