I'm worrying about one of my Controlled Assessments for OCR GCSE's Computing (A453)

You're still going on about this? The holidays are nearly over and you haven't stopped worrying like you wanted to, even though there are two pages of people telling you that you will be fine

I find it crazy how people have done 70+ pages per coursework task to get an A*. My A453 was 34 pages, and my A452 was 26 pages. I got an A* in both of those courseworks, and even the combined number of pages between the two don't come close to 70. You guys need to chill with the excessive amount of detail you put into the coursework, it really isn't needed tbh...

It's hard to know what the exam board likes to see. I know there's a mark scheme but the mark scheme isn't detailed enough.

26-34 pages per coursework? Wow.

Not really tbh... If you think about it logically, a exam board isn't gonna wanna see excessive detail for a piece of coursework at GCSE level. The rule of "quality not quantity" still applies. I had a very good Computing teacher though, maybe that contributes to this whole scenario.

I was just thanking another user. I feel fine now, thanks.

Hey,
I was wondering if you coudl explain something to me about the A453 coursework. I've finished all my coding all i have left is the documentation. Can you give me like advice/tips on testing and development?? like how would you do the test pan and what does systematic tetsing mean? I'm struggling to find a good way to lay out my testing.

Thanks!

For testing (from what I was told) you simply need to run through everything you want the program to do, and then document the result.

How you present this is up to you, but the basic things to record are what you're testing, what you expect to happen, and what actually happened. Remember to try to break your program as much as possible and record how this goes; assume that your user is the most techno-phobic person possible.

Systematic testing is your testing whilst you develop your code (i.e. you build a new feature and you test to see if it did as expected). This doesn't have to be explicitly labelled testing, but you need to make it obvious in your write-up that you tried each bit of code before moving on. If you've been writing up everything you do as you do it (always recommendable as otherwise you're likely to forget what you were thinking at the time), chances are you'll have already done this.

If you want any more help with this, it might be best to create a new thread as we're taking this one somewhat off-topic.

For testing (from what I was told) you simply need to run through everything you want the program to do, and then document the result.

How you present this is up to you, but the basic things to record are what you're testing, what you expect to happen, and what actually happened. Remember to try to break your program as much as possible and record how this goes; assume that your user is the most techno-phobic person possible.

Do you do the testing before or after you've completed the program? Or, during...?

Systematic testing is when you're writing the program; you're checking that what you've written does what it's meant to do. That is something you should be doing throughout the programming process. At the end of each task, you should do a full process of testing your program, throwing everything at it and generally trying to break it (as described above).

Yes, but do you do the systematic testing within the testing log or do you show it through your development log?

I find it crazy how people have done 70+ pages per coursework task to get an A*. My A453 was 34 pages, and my A452 was 26 pages. I got an A* in both of those courseworks, and even the combined number of pages between the two don't come close to 70. You guys need to chill with the excessive amount of detail you put into the coursework, it really isn't needed tbh...