[Graham Stoddart]

13/05/2022 at 8:40 am

Hi

As a department, we are looking to deliver alternative courses for some of our pupils. Our reasoning is as follows. As a school, we deliver National 5 and Higher Computing Science. Occasionally, after one or two unit tests or a prelim, it becomes obvious that a candidate may struggle with these qualifications. Traditionally, they have dropped to level 4 or if they were a Higher candidate, they use the time to work on their other subjects.
We are looking for aligned courses that we can perhaps deliver instead. By aligned, I mean courses that have similar knowledge and skills. We are not looking at delivering a new, different, course in three months! Ideally we are looking for qualifications that have no final exam. We would aim to deliver any content not covered in Nat 5 or Higher and try to get the candidate through the assessments. This would mean that a candidate would leave us, after several years, with a Computing qualification.

My question is; does anyone know of courses that have similar content to Nat 5 and Higher that have no final exam that we could perhaps get the pupils through?

[Kirsteen Nakau]

16/05/2022 at 7:44 am

As an alternative to N5 Computing which we run over two years with S3 into S4 we also offer combined NPA L5 in Games Development & NPA L5 in Digital media. Probably not quite what you were thinking of but it is a good alternative to those not quite ready for N5 computing. It is actually possible to take Computing too as the options are in separate columns. NPA awards have their own challenges as unlike exams when you can miss out a few questions and still pass, the NPA’s require you to tick every box and pass all outcomes to gain an award.

• This reply was modified 1 year ago by Kirsteen Nakau.