What have we learned this year and where are we going?

Exams are over, results are in and what an odd experience the last year has been.

OCR, the ever thoughtful people that they are, decided to send out certificates that you can print out for your students if you weren't naughty when doing the GCSE coursework to say well done for putting all that effort in for nothing. Remember, this is what you get for not cheating! Bonus.

The A-Level went well again this year and it was nice to see comments from the coursework moderator along the lines of "Christ, you're not cheating here either are you?!" The students did very well this year and several of our students have gone on to study Computing at university. Long may their beards grow.

As for GCSE, we improved for the third year running, proving that if you have a pair of complete nutters stood in front of you for two years, desperately trying to ram some information in your head in an interesting way you do actually learn something if you turn up and do as we ask. 

In all seriousness I could not have wished for a finer set of GCSE students than I had this year. They were a genuine pleasure to stand in front of several times a week and I enjoyed every lesson. I am exceptionally proud to say we had our first grade 9 this year and on paper two the student in question was 2 marks off 100%. I take no credit for that performance, the amount of work the student put in meant the success lies with them alone. I also look forward to welcoming many of them back next year as Year 12 students, where I will have to learn their names all over again because I won't recognise them in different clothes.

But what have we learned from the experience of changing to the "tougher" exams. Well, in summary:

• Coursework should never, ever come back. There is literally no way to enforce the rules, people will always push the boundaries in a pressurised, results driven environment. Please, don't put us through that any more. OCR, if you're reading, take note.
• The paper 2 results show that you either "get it" or don't and this is really dangerous for students who are achieving around a grade 4 because the results show you actually either get less than that or significantly more. Grade 4 wasn't popular, 3 and 5 were. There is no such split in results for paper 1.
• We now know what the grade boundaries are likely to look like. It's the same as before - you need a comparatively high percentage to pass CS than you do in many other subjects. This means either we are up against some serious beard across the country or life is just unfair. I'm yet to decide which.
• The way we teach programming and algorithms is reasonable but we need much more practice at it - now we have an idea what an exam looks like that task has become a lot easier.

So what's on the to do list this year? There's a lot of work to do on the site, but here's my thoughts going forwards:

• A-Level lessons are pretty much going to stay as they are. I want to find a better way of sharing them with other schools and I'll be looking in to a few ideas this year. The lessons on this site haven't been synchronised with the ones I'm currently using and there have been a fair few updates.
• GCSE - Unit 1 I'm quite happy with, it just needs finishing off and that'll be my immediate priority.
• Unit 2 - I'm in the middle of quite a significant re-write of a lot of the resources and revision material. I had a real change of heart about how I wanted to approach teaching this and I need to update the site to reflect the "new way."
• KS3 - for the first time ever I'm going to be sharing a set of resources for KS3 lessons that I'm developing for this year. In short you may notice Python makes me ill and scratch is enough to make me implode, so we start our students off with Microsoft Small Basic in Year 7 because it reminds me of the warm, comforting times when computers were simpler and crashed more frequently to keep things interesting. We follow this up with Visual Basic. If you're not a language snob then you'll look forward to the resources appearing here over the coming months.

And quite frankly I think that's enough for one year - we've got students to motivate...

There are no winners when people start discussing programming languages...