ICT curriculum last updated in… 1999

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Things move incredibly quickly in technology. Back in the March 1999 issue of PC Pro, for example, our news section was bemoaning the fact NT4 was as “secure as a piece of Swiss cheese” and marvelling at the prospect of some blue-sky BT technology called ADSL.

Why the sudden flashback to 1999? Because that, according to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority’s website, was the last time the ICT National Curriculum for 5 to 11-year-olds was updated. Scan right down to the bottom of the page, and there you’ll find: “This content relates to the 1999 programmes of study and attainment targets.”

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Back to school with a bump

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

We’ve all read the stories over the years about exams getting easier, but I always just assumed they were Daily Mail rabble-rousing rubbish. But having sat a GCSE ICT exam for myself – that’s an exam intended to tax 16 year-olds by the way – I can safely say they’re getting, if anything, more difficult. And not in a good way.

As my rather embarrassing performance demonstrates, actual IT understanding didn’t seem to play a huge part in the marking of the paper. On questions requiring written answers, you could have written an entire page of sound argument, but if you didn’t include the precise terms or points in the mark scheme, you lost the mark.

In fact, the whole experience went a long way to convincing me of a common argument: that today’s exams are largely based around training pupils to memorise the particular key facts they’re expected to know.

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Who’s top of the PC Pro class?

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

As you may have read from our news story on the appalling state of GCSE IT examinations, five of the PC Pro team has sat the same ICT GCSE Higher paper that thousands of teenagers would have sweated over last summer.

So how did our team of so-called experts do?

Top of the class was deputy editor, David Fearon, who scored a lofty 70 out of 80 – which in this day and age is probably enough to land him a scholarship at Oxford, let alone an A*. David only let himself down on his definitions of testing, extreme data and erroneous data – although given the ridiculously prescriptive marking scheme, we believe it was the answers that were erroneous, rather than David.

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