A/AS level IT

[tiggerai]

Well in my experience i wouldn't bother doing a-level computing or it at school, as quite frankly it was crap. It taught bad practise and i had to unlearn what i learnt at a-level before i could learn what was being taught at degree.

But that may just be my experience.

TiG

Mine clashed with French so I couldn't do it, but to be honest you won't learn anything useful from A Level IT or computing that you won't have to re-learn at uni / in work. (from those who did it, they say it's pants.)

My degree was much better for that kind of thing (and just in case anyone hasn't picked this up) and I'm now an interface designer and coder for a large company. Not doing A level computing hasn't hindered me at all.

As said before, Maths and Physics are much better choices and will be accepted at most unis over Computing.

[steve threlfall]

i am an a-level student who is planing to do my A2-level computing project in VB.Net. pls help me with desiding on my projects topic.

Holy irrelevant thread revival batman

Its a good job your not doing english

[tiggerai]

Didn't notice that!!

hehe

[UltraMagnus]

did AS and A2 computing here, but i have seen what the ICT people do.

basically, computing in AS we had to write a few very basic programs in VB6, A2 was building a very basic database and front end for it.... all very boring, and i am still mentally scarred from having to use VB

ICT, from what i know, AS is loads of excel and other stuff, A2 was very similar.

although, it depends on the exam board, we used OCR, which are a bunch of complete morons with exams that are 5 - 10 years out of date in there information

[Sprite]

I thought A2 Computing was/is decent.

Also next year, on the Edexcel course I think it is, the coursework will have to all be done in programming, no databases.

[Rishi]

The clue is in the name its Information Technology so your not gonna be getting any of the "cool" stuff to do. Its more about DB's and how info flows, you might be asked to build a small DB for a "customer" and document it, touches on Normalisation and DFDs if I remember correctly.

Its a pretty straight forward award, you dont need GCSE IT (ICT) or whatever it is these days. Its more common sense about using a computer.

And yes the exams do make you laugh, but dont put answers like "Well I would buy a Q6600 and overclock it" as that sort of stuff is 'frowned' upon.

The only thing I learnt from As and A level IT was about documentation, the rest was crap.

[IBM]

I read down as far as the Swafe post and realised I'd been sucked into a zombie thread.....

[UltraMagnus]

I thought A2 Computing was/is decent.

Also next year, on the Edexcel course I think it is, the coursework will have to all be done in programming, no databases.

from what i know, edexcel is far, far better than OCR

The clue is in the name its Information Technology so your not gonna be getting any of the "cool" stuff to do. Its more about DB's and how info flows, you might be asked to build a small DB for a "customer" and document it, touches on Normalisation and DFDs if I remember correctly.

Its a pretty straight forward award, you dont need GCSE IT (ICT) or whatever it is these days. Its more common sense about using a computer.

And yes the exams do make you laugh, but dont put answers like "Well I would buy a Q6600 and overclock it" as that sort of stuff is 'frowned' upon.

The only thing I learnt from As and A level IT was about documentation, the rest was crap.

oh god, yes, i remember all the effin hoops we had to jump through to fake a "customer". really, wtf, did they actually expect us to find a real customer?

[Rishi]

oh god, yes, i remember all the effin hoops we had to jump through to fake a "customer". really, wtf, did they actually expect us to find a real customer?

We had to make a small form which the "customer" would sign, saying that they are in fact real and committed to the project. I know only one person who did this correctly, it was for a newagents, making the classic newpaper stock system with some crappy graph stuff added on.

To be honest (might get slated here) you only learn computing from (a) teaching yourself and (b) actually doing it as work day in day out.

Oh yea, I think the documentation gets marked by how big it is, that was t he general rule in my college.