Help
(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 specialises 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*
