Controlled assessmentThirty-six hours, sixty marks, and a new scenario every June
The practical unit is coursework, but tightly bounded coursework, and the boundaries are published.
The controlled assessment rules, in CCEA's words| Rule | What the specification says |
|---|
| Who sets the task | The level of control is "high. This means that we set the task." |
| How often it changes | "We will publish a new scenario-based task for Unit 3 and Unit 5 in June each year." |
| Size of the task | "The controlled assessment task is worth 60 marks and will take a maximum of 36 hours to complete." |
| Supervision | Task taking is "medium" control: teachers monitor progress, prevent plagiarism, give advice if there are problems and certify the work is the candidate's own. |
| Working together | "Candidates can work in pairs or groups, but it is essential that the teacher can identify individual contributions." |
| Who marks it | Task marking is "medium" control: "teachers mark the task and we moderate the results." |
| Referencing | "Candidates must reference appropriately all the materials they use in their work, including any online resources." |
What thirty-six hours actually buys
Roughly a school term of lessons, spent designing, building, testing and evaluating one solution. It is the longest single piece of technical work most Northern Irish teenagers will have produced, and it is worth 30 per cent of the grade.
That design is worth sitting with, because it is the opposite of the arrangement over the Irish Sea in Wales. There a scenario arrives a year ahead, none of the preparation may enter the examination room and none of it is marked. Here the work itself is the assessment: supervised, teacher-marked, moderated by CCEA, and built over 36 hours a student can plan. Neither approach is soft. They test different things, and a family that understands which one their child faces prepares very differently.
We do not touch controlled assessment work. A CCEA task is set, supervised and certified inside a school, and a tutor who helped with it would put a candidate's entry at risk. What we teach is everything that makes the 36 hours go well: decomposing a problem, designing before typing, writing a test plan in tabular form with black box and white box tests, and evaluating honestly against the user requirements. Those are CCEA's own words for what Unit 5 rewards, and none of them are things a student can only learn inside the task.
Design before code
CCEA asks for a "fully decomposed solution" specified before it is built. Most lost marks here are not programming failures; they are a student who started typing in hour one.
A test plan, in a table
Presented in tabular format, with appropriate test data, expected output, and run-time and logic errors identified. It is a skill, it is teachable, and it is rarely taught.
An honest evaluation
Refer to the user requirements, to performance during testing, and to the refinements testing showed were needed. Naming a weakness scores better than hiding one.
Where the marks live overall
Across the whole qualification CCEA sets the assessment objectives at AO1 30 per cent for knowledge and understanding, AO2 46 per cent for applying that knowledge to investigate problems and propose solutions, and AO3 24 per cent for designing, developing and evaluating solutions, with a stated tolerance of plus or minus 3 per cent. Nearly half the qualification is application. Recall alone does not carry a candidate here.
