Advanced Higher Computing Science

We’ve updated the Advanced Higher Computing Science coursework assessment to provide additional guidance for candidates. This guidance will help candidates to ensure their projects are of suitable scope and have an appropriate volume of evidence, and to present their evidence in a way that helps them to track their requirements through all stages of the project.

Feedback from markers in 2024 was that candidates who completed very ambitious projects had difficulty tracking their requirements through all stages of the project, which had an impact on the marks they achieved. 

Updates to the coursework assessment task include:

• limiting the projects to six end user and 24 functional requirements to ensure projects have a suitable scope and that the volume of evidence is not excessive
• providing recommended times for completing each stage of the project
• referring to a template that candidates can use to record and present their evidence. This template is available in the 'Coursework' tab of the Advanced Higher Computing Science web page.

We’ve updated the 'Time' and 'Volume' sections of the course specification to reflect the changes to the coursework assessment task. We’ve also updated 'Appendix 3: entity relationship diagrams' and 'Appendix 9: standard algorithms' to provide clarity in examples, following feedback and questions from practitioners. 

The updated documents are dated October 2024, and you can access them from the ‘course specification’ and ‘coursework’ tabs below.