The week in your words: Exams, Viacom and Vista

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Posted on 30 May 2008 at 17:58

In a week that saw a GCSE exam take down PC Pro, Viacom take another swipe at Youtube, and David Fearon take a shine to Vista, we take a look back to see what our readers have made of it all.

The ridiculous GCSE ICT exam questions that beat PC Pro

Here at PC Pro we pride ourselves on our exhaustive testing of everything that passes across our periphery, as proven by the now infamous "what's the best brand of baked beans stand-off." However, the utter humiliation we visited upon ourselves by agreeing to take a GCSE IT exam, may have been an experiment too far, as we each limped in at varying degrees of mediocrity. Thankfully, our forums understood our pain.

"It seems that the exam markers themselves know next to nothing about the subject," rages Wideboy20. "In one of my GCSE ICT papers, I got marked 22%, submitted it for re-marking, and came out with 75%! I got the transcript back, and I was answering all the questions correctly, but I wasn't using the exact phrases from the mark scheme and in some cases I was marked down for being too detailed."

Noelkelly was equally unimpressed: "This helps explain the answers we got from some graduates from a London university when interviewing them for a job a few years ago. More than one could not begin to explain what a DHCP server did, were unsure what an IP address was and happily confessed to not owning a computer at home."

The ludicrous exam did have one supporter though. Well, sort of: "Subject teachers would be expected to familiarise themselves with examiners' mark schemes, and AQA run training days for teachers clarifying exactly what points they would want covered topic-by-topic, so that subject leaders can pass this information on to students," says LiseS.

"All of this raises the issue of teaching to the test. I am absolutely in agreement that training students to pass exams is a different matter entirely from educating with a subject understanding and the capability to think intelligently for themselves. But this is surely a can of worms for another day."

Viacom: piracy is the cornerstone of YouTube

Indeed it is, especially when there's an existing can of worms to play with, namely the spat between Viacom and Google over copyrighted material on YouTube. Viacom claims YouTube wouldn't survive without users reposting its programming, while Google reckons it would and its dad is bigger than Viacom's anyway, so there.

Talbot_Avenger got the ball rolling with admirable succinctness: "To be honest I don't visit YouTube to watch videos of someone's cute cat being cute."

Krisjones2 was also slightly perplexed: "I do think Viacom and some content owners are somewhat short-sighted about 'clips' of their content appearing on sites like YouTube. Often such clips help to drive people towards the content rather than damaging their opportunity to earn royalties. YouTube often serves as an effective and extremely cheap form of viral marketing. Indeed some, like the BBC, have embraced YouTube by posting their own 'clips'."

"The problem is that it isn't "clips" which are appearing, it is whole shows or films appearing in 10 minute segments," big_D shot back. "The copyright holders have no choice in the matter. If YouTube hosts material for public consumption, they have to take action to get it removed. The only way a clip can, legally, stay online is if the copyright holder loads it up... Like the BBC does."