2012 higher computing

cheers that helped me broo, even thou iht wasnt meant for me :')
calculations are sumtimes straight forward a guess.. buh computing in general is solid
like how would u recognise value or reference parameters in a problem solving question..?
aand questions like ''why is documentation in the testing stage important for iterative purposes'' and stuff


wish me luck for the exam !

Ah you'll be fine! You have plenty of time to revise for the exam, and I'm sure your coursework will push your grade up!

thankz, i supertonically hope so . Got 49/60 for coursework thou :/, and im predicted an 'A' but getting iht seems hard nw lol.

Yay, AH French and AH Computing! :'D

I don't find traces that bad but alot of people in my class do! I know that my friend is trying past papers then getting the teacher to write out the correct answer then she's working out where she went wrong if that's any help to you

I'm one of only 2 girls who've signed up for AH Computing and she's considering dropping it D:

49/60 isn't bad! That's you got 49/200 already, and to get an A you only need about 91/140 in Thursdays exam, which is only 65%. With plenty of revision, you'll easily achieve a B, if not an A.

An A in computing would make my day, but then so would getting a B in almost everyone if not all of my subjects, my coursework was awarded 58, which tying with others in the class was the highest. The exam however, is dauntilng to me, needing to be very specific, I plan on studying almost 2 hours each day, if not more.

This was posted from The Student Room's Android App on my R800i

49/60 isn't bad! That's you got 49/200 already, and to get an A you only need about 91/140 in Thursdays exam, which is only 65%. With plenty of revision, you'll easily achieve a B, if not an A.

Anyone knows the grade boundaries for 2011 or last years? (Approx)

The grade boundaries for an A for most years has been 132/200, so if he has 49/200 already that means he would only need 83/140 (59%) in the exam to achieve the minimum mark for an A 132/200.

Calculations Involved In Unit 1 , 2 and Multimedia (If your doing one of the other sections i'm afraid i'm unable to help you out here. I'm sure if you visit the scholar website and look up the other sections you could get some help)

Calculation of a bitmap file:

Total Pixels * Bit depth

In the case of a standard resolution e.g. 100x100 to find out the total pixels you would just multiply them together.

In the case of a DPI you would square the DPI and then multiply this by each dimension.

E.g. 3 inches by 4 inches in a 300dpi image = 300^2 x 3 x 4

Now that you've figured out your total pixels you multiply by the bit depth.

If the bit depth is 24 then you would in the case of the standard resolution of 100x100 simply multiply by 24.

Bear in mind that your calculation will give you an answer in bits that needs to be first divided by 8 before division by 1024. A quick way to get your answer in bytes would be to simply divide the bit-depth by 8 before you multiply it into the rest of the equation. Using the previous example instead of multiplying by 24 you would simply multiply by 3 and this will get you the same answer. Saves time.

Calculation of Addressability:

You could be asked to calculate the total addressability of a processor. You would be provided with the information of a size of Data Bus and Address Bus.

The size of the address bus is key. You put the size of the Address Bus to the power of 2 e.g.

32 bit address bus = 2^(to the power of) 32

Once you've got this answer you simply multiply by the size of the Data Bus for example if the Data Bus was 24 bits then:

2^32 (Address Bus) multiplied by 24

Same trick applies where you can divide the 24 by 8 before in order to prevent having to divide by 8 later on.

Please bear in mind they could give you different parts of the equation and ask you to work out the other data involved e.g. the total addressability and the size of the address bus and ask you to work out the size of the data bus. I'm going to assume you can all rearrange simply formulas and this is in fact easy marks. In the case of the calculations of the bit mapped files these sorts of questions are more likely to pop up in Multimedia, for example being asked to work out the bit-depth.

The next calculations are multimedia only - If you study AI or Networking then don't bother with this stuff.


Calculation of the size of a video:

Key understanding here - a video is a series of bit-mapped images which are viewed at a fast pace in order to fool the user in the idea they are watching a video

Therefore the equation of an UNCOMPRESSED video is as such:

FPS*Length*Total Pixels*Bit-depth

You may notice the Total Pixels*Bit-depth is the calculation we carried out before so this should be familiar to you.

Therefore you simply have to multiply by the Frames Per Second (Basically the speed of the video) and the length of the video in SECONDS. You may have to convert minutes to an amount of seconds but this is common sense. An example would be:

Calculate the uncompressed file size of a 3 minute video clip, captured at 25 frames per second with a resolution of 640 x 480 and 24 bit colour

FPS (25) * Length(180) * Total Pixels (640*480) * Bit depth (3 BYTES)

Calculation of a Sound File:

The formula goes as such:

Length of File (Seconds) * Sampling Frequency * Sample Depth * Number of Channels

I'm not going to go into detail over what the Sampling Frequency and Depth actually are as you should of covered this in class however in the case of the calculation an example would be:

A three minute audio clip recorded in stereo with a sampling frequency of 44.1 KHz and a sampling depth of 16 bits =

Length of file (180) * Sampling Frequency (44100) * Sample Depth (16) * Number Of Channels (2)

3 minutes = 180 seconds
44.1KHz = 44100 hertz
Sample Depth = 16 (Remember the trick from Bit-Depth? Same applies here)
Number Of Channels = 2 ( Mono means one channel , Stereo means two)

Hope this helps for the person who was asking for caluculations.

But isn't the course work only worth 20%? Or by adding the coursework grade that being the 20% it is only the rest of the exam that needs to be added?

The grade boundaries for an A for most years has been 132/200, so if he has 49/200 already that means he would only need 83/140 (59%) in the exam to achieve the minimum mark for an A 132/200.

SQA Statistics has them - they're near the bottom of the page, and below that is a drop-down box to select the year.

Is it me or when I download it I see just a table for Standard Grade..

Nope - it's 30% (60/200 marks)

You need to change worksheet. If you're using Excel, and probably most other spreadsheet software, it's down the bottom-left.