CCEA AS-Level Software Systems Development - 24th May 2024 - Exam chat

Thought I’d create this for students to talk about the recent CCEA SSD written paper. Personally I thought it was a horrible paper, with quite a few mean questions, and being hard to understand. The CCEA SSD specification in my opinion needs to be completely redone. They do not allow enough time, it’s awful expecting students to write code on paper, the specification which should be made to help students to know what to learn is extremely unhelpful, for example doesn’t mention algorithms or search/sorts yet they are a common occurrence now in exams (while not in 2024 paper). Teachers and student need to be given more help so they know what to expect in the exam, and the questions need to be worded more clearly as most the time it’s very unclear what it being asked of you. For example in this paper it wanted you to apply 5% discount if the people booked 4 walks and 10% discount if they booked 6 walks however the way it’s worded it’s unclear whether that should be greater than 6 walks gets the 10% or if it has to be specifically 6 walks. There are many more examples like this that are extremely common in the papers and is unfair for students as they have to spend a long time trying to figure out what the question is asking and then possibility getting it wrong because CCEA sees it a different way and typically doesn’t like backing down from what they decided.

There’s my rant over, feel free to voice your views of the paper below.