Just sat the Aberystwyth 2025 Computer Science Scholarship Exam

I'm currently in my second year of A Levels (Maths, Comp Sci, Physics) and had received a call from a student rep at Aberystwyth advising me to come to open days and look at their scholarships (I applied to do joint honours Maths + Comp Sci BSc)
I looked at their scholarships and thought "wow this is great" because it's like an additional chance for acceptance (and 1k for each year of study!).
So I applied, fast forward to now, and now have just sat the first paper (Computer Science, I have to do maths later today) and holy ****.
WHY ARE THE QUESTIONS SO OPEN ENDED?? EACH QUESTION WAS AT LEAST LIKE 15 MARKS????????
I'm diagnosed with autism (shocking, i know) and I have no idea if it's anything to do with that but I found the nature of the questions very ******* weird and I really struggled to complete the paper even with 20% extra time as reasonable adjustment.

For example, as a common theme in their cs papers, Section A question 1 part A is where they give you a "type of data" (sometimes with an example) and ask for its data type/primitive type/a data structure (e.g. the latitude and longitude of a plane) and then ask you to also specify the language.
Immediately, even with that example, my brain is thinking "Okay is there a plane class I need to be aware of for this? Is this wanting me to simply state the data type of a SINGLE variable? I could store this as two Strings, I could also store it as two Floats OR two Doubles for extra precision, or I could store it as a fixed length array or tuple that contains either String, Float or Double. This also depends on how precise the device which monitors latitude and longitude is.". I did write my entire thought process for the question as it did ask you to provide a reason for your answer.
BUT WHY IS THERE EVEN THAT LEVEL OF OPEN INTERPRETATION??? WHY DO I HAVE TO SPECIFY THE LANGUAGE??? HOW THE **** IS THE MEANING OF "INTEGER" IN SAY PYTHON ANY DIFFERENT TO ANY OTHER LANGUAGE?????

Also, as parts B and C to their first question, they ask you to write pseudocode algorithms... IN ****IN' MICROSOFT WORD! Literally, paper is a better method for programming as word has spell checking and auto capitalisation and punctuation etc which ****s it up. I did like using word to write my responses to the written questions though. On top of that though, I also struggled to grasp what I was allowed to assume as a programmer. They ask you to say any optimisations you have made, any you could make, stuff about time+space complexity etc, but one of the questions I just did would have (i think, in the exam i didnt even have time to properly think about whether or not it would) been more optimised by using a prime factorisation algorithm along side the rest of the algorithm, I DONT HAVE TIME FOR THAT! They also had an algorithm question in which I used syntactic sugar (e.g. list comprehension and ++) because otherwise I would have not been able to finish the paper at all, this links back to what i was saying about allowed assumptions as a programmer, am i allowed to use python-like list comprehension in pseudocode? I explained what it meant. Really they do not give you enough time at all because they expect you to write and optimise and explain TWO algorithms. HOWWWWWWW??????????

Finally, in section B, you are allowed to choose one of two collections of extended written response questions ( :frown:

), the first collection in the paper which I just sat were about general topics in computer science (e.g. The importance of protocols, the factors affecting the performance of a CPU) and I found it really challenging because not only did I have barely any time left after grappling with the questions in section A, but like all the questions in this paper THEY WERE JUST SO VAGUE! Each question is worth so many marks and is very unspecific and it doesn't make sense to me how I'm meant to go about answering these and I had to rush as well. THE QUESTION IS LIKE 10 WORDS LONG AND THEN THE ANSWER IS LIKE 19 MARKS?????

I don't think I did terribly, but I'm very concerned that I may not have passed, and it's really upsetting because I know my abilities when it comes to comp sci and I don't think this paper allows for an accurate reflection of my skills in the subject.

(edited 11 months ago)

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