Dilemma

I'm posting on behalf of my brother, who is in a predicament. He recently realized he wants to do Computer Science at Uni, but this is his current position.
At his first 6th form he performed badly, achieving DDDUU in his A levels, then he decided to repeat his AS year in a new college, and achieved BCDU in Maths, English, Business Studies, and ICT(to be honest hes excellent with computers and this really is... unbelievable... mostly due to the coursework despite his being quite good) respectively. He is going to retake on module in maths which will almost certainly knock him up to an A in maths, which he was very close to, and he is retaking a module in English to bump him up to a B(as his other modules were all As), and hes disputing whether to retake a Business studies module to bump it up to a B.

But down to the point: Does my brother have any chance of getting into a Uni for CS... and if so, which Universities will accept him; he has his heart set on Nottingham, but i don't see this as realistic

Note: His GCSEs were mediocre.

Reply 1

supernova2

Nottingham is very doubtful tbh. If he ends up with something like BCC hes probably not going to be in the top 30 unis.

Reply 2

PeeWeeDan

Thanks, can you elaborate? :smile:

Reply 3

Dionysus

He doesn't have much hope of Nottingham, to be honest. Not unless he improves them dramatically. As for ICT, it's no reflection on him, the same thing happens to everybody. The course is abysmal and the mark-scheme completely laughable. They actually make up the answers AFTER they get peoples' exam scripts back! Seriously, that's coming from somebody at the sharp end of the marking. The answers to exactly the same questions also vary from year to year. Thus, the only way to actually do well is to guess what this year's correct answers are.

Reply 4

Psyk

They wouldn't care about not doing well in ICT. It's not really any reflection of how good you would be at CS.

Reply 5

Ancient18

I dont get what everyone says about ict not being computer related.

I would consider myself pretty good with computers and i scored quite high in all my ict modules with little to no effort. Hell i sat modules 5 and 6 without even being through the lessons i tought it to myself.
I do have the advantage of having doen project work and so before.
but still i don't get why everyone does so badly in ict.

Im really not trying to brag or so but i just don't get the trouble everyone has with ict - especially computery people who have done small projects before.

Reply 6

Psyk

ICT (at A-level anyway) is more about how computers are used in society, rather than being the study of computation and the technical aspects of computing like CS is. It is about computers but only because they are what we use for building information systems. Quite a large amount of the ICT syllabus could be applied to a paper based system.