[Chris Aitken]

26/05/2014 at 8:34 am

Does anyone know what the laptop icon in exam question 19b (ii) represents. I’m at a complete loss.

[Lee Murray]

26/05/2014 at 10:09 am

I’m still waiting to get a copy of the paper 🙁

[Chris Aitken]

26/05/2014 at 10:32 am

I’ve stuck the paper up in N5 Documents

[Stuart Rose]

26/05/2014 at 10:36 am

My guess is to do with using a power saving technique on the screen but I’m really not sure.

[Lee Murray]

26/05/2014 at 11:01 am

Thanks for uploading the paper, Chris.

I have no idea what the SQA might be expecting with that question.

Could it be:

“Set your laptop to hibernate after it hasn’t been used for a period of time”?
“Reduce your screen brightness to use less energy”?
“Use an energy efficient laptop”?
“Use a laptop rather than a desktop as they use less energy”?

Maybe all of the above would be possible accepted answers, but for 1 mark I’d be telling my pupils not to think too hard about it.

[martin hill]

26/05/2014 at 1:03 pm

Who knows?

My pupils were all delighted that they’d been asked the same design notation question twice – Q18d and Q20f.

[Alan McGregor]

27/05/2014 at 2:44 pm

Thanks for the upload!

I’m still none the wiser on what they’re after for 15(b)(i) –> THE feature of HTML code which allows the webpage to be formatted.

Anyone?

[Anonymous]

27/05/2014 at 2:47 pm

It was a strange question, I guessed they must be looking for “tags”. One of my pupils wrote CSS and I would have hoped that was accceptable too.

[Alan McGregor]

27/05/2014 at 2:50 pm

Yep, CSS isn’t a ‘feature’ of HTML and it’s not in the arrangements, but you’d hope they would accept it. Tags? Hadn’t thought of that one, but suppose it works. A weird question indeed!

[Brian Clark]

27/05/2014 at 7:17 pm

Yup. That feature of HTML stumped a lot of our pupils too. We did the games review assignment, and pretty much all pupils used an external style sheet, so many of them said that they put CSS as the feature. One said he listed a few tags, but state the term ‘tags’. I would hope that at least css is accepted.

As for the laptop picture question, I have no idea what would be expected. Pupils answers varied from ‘buy a laptop with led display’ to ‘auto shut down whne not in use after a period of time”.

I was also surprised at some of the questions eg state the URL of the webpage and what does RAM stand for. Not that the pupils complained, but I thought they were a little too straight forward. I would thought identifying a particular part of the URL and some kind of memory question relating to buses would’ve been more in keeping…… Maybe that’s just me.

[Graeme McCartney]

28/05/2014 at 11:32 am

Q 13 and Q16 cii had a bit of an overlap as both asked about test data.

Didn’t have pupils sitting this year but out of interest. Can anyone confirm whether the SQA are expecting pupils to use HAGGIS when they writing pseudocode (eg Q16b) or will a more loosely phrased algorithm suffice (the kind of pseudocode that would have been acceptable for Int 2 e.g. without Line numbers and HAGGIS key words such as RECEIVE FROM KEYBOARD)?

Thanks

Graeme

[Nicky Pasternak]

28/05/2014 at 2:20 pm

Thought the paper was reasonable and gives us a better indication of what is expected from a National 5 pupil than the Specimen paper did. In answer to your original post , Chris, how about

“Recycle your old laptop to keep hazardous waste out of landfill”

Seems reasonable to me!

On a more serious note, the Turtlegraphics Logo type questions are certainly good problem solving but demand a pretty good level of Mathematical knowledge. Maths or Computing Science? Good challenging computational thinking though.