computer science exams and coursework

Absolutely. Writing style is important. I will give you a heads up to prepare for university: check out LaTeX. Most univerisities require you to write reports using this ridiculous software package. It is overwhelming at first, especially compared to the difficulty of Microsoft Word.

Secondly, you are marked based on the vocabulary and academic writing style. For example, if you write: I am going to speak about ....; you will receive maybe 1 or 2 marks for academic writing. Compared to: After discussing x and y, the next section will discuss z. This is called signposting, and you will be marked on this. The corrected sentence should receive the top 9/10 marks for academic writing style, that is what you should be writing. No personal pronouns, and it has to be concise.

Thirdly, most essays are written under a strict 2000 word essay, allowing up to 99 words over (2099) with a 3 mark deduction for each subsequent 100 words. You will have to write some form or report at some point at university. It is best to do it early on to recognise your mistakes since it is the third year that proposes a majority of the marks for your degree classification.

Research is based on the topic. Generally you look around 6 hours of research first for a specific question, collate it, remove that is irrelevant then create the report. Six hours is a guidance and changes constantly, it is important to note it depends on the topic you are researching.

I would suggest not to read these books until you start the course, otherwise you will confuse yourself even further until it is explained. I would recommend researching Discrete Mathematics and its applications. Most "good", in my opinion, computer science courses, has Discrete Mathematics as a topic in the first year, or at least a form of it.

This, again, varies. My first semester examinations were all multiple choice questions (MCQ) you are given little to prepare except from class tests, so make good use of them, and lecture notes. The reason being that there is only a limited amount of questions, and effectively, the same questions from the lecture notes can come up in the exam - as they did for me. So it is useful to revise the examples the lecturer gives.

My second semester has around three which are non-MCQ that mean they are completely made up questions unique to that exam - at least I think they are, as I have not seen a recurring question on any non-MCQ exam.

With regards to programs, you will have to write pseudo code - which you may not yet be familiar with unless you study Computing A-Level. You have to write this form of code in the exam, hoping that it works. The pseudo code would be written to be compiled if it was in Visual Studio, or any other compiler software. So if you were deducted marks for the pseudo code, it would mean it would not work as intended as the question asks if you ran the same code in Visual Studio, as an example.

I hope this cleared up your questions.