ICT GCSE's - Shocking

[Malaris 0]

Well I just took my 1 hour 30 mins ICT exam this morning, and I have to say it was ridiculous.

 

(for those who don't know, GCSE's are part of compulsory education in England, which are a 2 year course involving regular exams and pieces of coursework, then resuting in a cluster of tests towards the end of the 2nd year [may-july], which is when the students are 16 years of age)

 

The board which writes the ICT eam obviously have no idea how far ICT, its users, software and demographic have come. I was genuinely shocked at the types of question on the single paper - the ones that were to do with ICT (many question seemed to be about Business Studies for some unknown reason).

 

Some examples of the questions on the paper are;

 

(note: these aren't the exact wordings of the questions)

 

How would one place a chart made in a spreadsheet into a word processor?

 

How could a printer be connecte to a computer other than by a parallel port?

 

Here is a list of computer components;

*Keyboard

*Mouse

*RAM

*Processor

*Hard Drive

*CD Writer

*Floppy Drive

*Printer

*Monitor

*Speakers

 

List 2 types of input device

List 2 types of output device

 

One question even consisted of a simple business document, and the task was to circle and label things like left/right aligned text, italic/bold tex and a footer!

 

 

Now, I can understand that people, even of the same age and year group, have varying levels of computer skills, but to be quite honest some of the questions on this paper were just plain insulting.

 

The reason I chose to do this 2 year course was to enhance my already quite competent computing skills to an even more advanced level (nothing wrong with a bit of modesty ), and after confering with many of my colleagues in the same class as me, they all felt this way too.

 

It seems the truth was shrouded from us in that this course was to teach people the extreme basics of computing, as this is the first time this course has been introduced, and they obviously wanted many takers so it looked good on the books.

 

In fairness, there are some people who will have benefited from this course, who had no or little knowledge of computers prior to this course, but this course was not advertised or labelled correctly.

 

IMO, the best way to learn about computing is with hands-on experience, and much of what I know now has been self taught by me actually exploring my PC, and learning what tings do, how they do it, and why they do it.

 

However, unless one has a grade/mark/certificate to prove this knowledge, many employers won't give you the time of day to prove your skills, so, being set on my career in computing I thought this was an ideal opportunity to get a GCSE in ICT, so i can show that I have considerable skills in the field of ICT- how wrong I was.

 

In england, compulsory education ends after these GCSEs (at 16), then there is the option to take 'A-Levels' - another set of 2 year courses, then it moves on to university.

 

I had decided at a very early stage that I wanted to carry on at school and continue my education, gaining more grades, and improving my grasp of ICT even more. Now I'm not so sure, and may even end up dropping ICT as a subject at school, and wait until a university that spe[censored]es in some aspect of ICT.

 

Thanks for mis-labelling an ICT course in which I wasted 2 years of my education government, thanks a bunch.

 

*rant over*

[ross_aveling 0]

I completely sympathise with you Malaris.

 

When I took my GCSEs there wasn’t even an IT related subject available to take. So, whilst it’s good to hear that there is such a GCSE subject available now, having it turn out to be a waste of time is (and I can speak from experience) completely destroying.

 

After school, I moved onto college to take a 2-year GNVQ Advanced IT course thinking, somewhat ridiculously, that I would be progressing my knowledge to an advanced IT level. How more wrong could I have been…..?

 

I can honestly say that for 90% of the course, I spent most of my time writing meaningless papers dealing primarily with basic business principles (health and safety even!!!) and if a computer related subject popped up it would be all about the ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’. Not once did we cover even generalised concepts of programming, networking or systems analysis for example.

 

All this was, of course, before the explosion of the Internet or mainstream OO programming, so you could argue that there wasn’t really anything exciting at the time to keep me interested. As a result, I spent the other 10% trying to break into the college’s Netware network (which myself and the other proper ‘geeks’ did on a regular basis). Having not really applied myself due to a complete lack of interest, I left with a mediocre grade.

 

Whilst I’m sure that the GNVQ course would have benefited some people, it definitely did not suit me. I’m the sort who had spent years beforehand learning everything I could from computer magazines and manuals. Attempting to do a certain thing and when it broke, finding out why it broke and what to do to fix it and ultimately what to know so not to do it again in the future. I'm still a firm believer in self tuition.

 

It sounds like the real problem with these sort of courses is that they are way too general to begin with, plus I also have to question the virtue of having such a qualification under your belt. I’ve not come across one employer that recognises a GNVQ in Advanced IT as an indictor of real IT knowledge. The only thing that seems important these days is to have an industry recognised qualification, like an MSCE for example (something I am working towards at the moment).

 

I just hope your ICT qualification (which I'm sure you'll obtain a good grade at) can prove to be a worthwhile stepping stone for greater oppotunities with future education and employment.

 

[iamroot 0]

I can understand how you are feeling right now. My school didnt offer ICT when I took my GCE exam so I was really looking forward to enrolling into the IT course in the polytechnic. I had at this time already discovered GNU/Linux and was really fervent to learn more about IT. My illusion was completely busted when I went through my 1st week of study and I received my study plans.

 

I was planning to take up the advanced programming module only to discover it was Java.(I had expected something like C or C++) I had no choice but to take the Computer Architecture module where I felt like crap cos we had to learn stupid stuff similar to what Malaris posted and the lecturer kept making stupid mistakes like Linux is a version of Unix, Solaris can only work on Sun hardware and Intel is the only processor brand for home users.

 

I had enrolled into the course to learn something new and enrich my knowledge but instead I'm stuck there for 3 years learning what does CPU stand for. Haiz.