OCR GCSE Computing controlled assessment - Does code have to be "efficient"?

Hello, I am in year 11 and just finished my controlled assessment OCR computing tasks. I'm a bit concerned though, as someone told me that if your code or algorithm isn't "efficient", then you can lose a lot of marks. Is this true or not, and if so to what extent? My code solutions to 2/3 of the tasks are quite big in size (I estimate the biggest one to be about 140 lines long), and I saw that other's had code that was quite a lot smaller. Is it true that if it's very big then you will lose marks? Thanks.

Hey there.
I did OCR GCSE Computing last year, and I can definitely tell you that efficiency is fairly important in your A453 coursework. The use of efficient programming techniques come under the "Efficient use of Programming" section of the mark scheme, this section holds 12 marks. Only a few marks are given for outstanding use of efficient programming technique. I achieved 12/12 in this section since I pretty much made my code as efficient as possible, I definitely went outside the box and thought of very complicated methods to handle the task I was given, hence the 12 marks which I achieved. Here is the code I wrote for my A453 2 years ago (we did our A453 in Y10).

http://prntscr.com/e7lmqx
http://prntscr.com/e7ln52
http://prntscr.com/e7ln94

Take a look at the screenshots above if you want some insight at how A* standard code looks like for A453.

I hope this helped.