Bristol, Bath and Somerset Computing at School

A question that came up in my recent training event on GCSE Computer Science knowledge was about arrays in the exam, specifically where students are presented with arrays in pseudo code.

 

Both AQA Computer Science and OCR Computing start indexing their arrays in the exam from 1 instead of 0 as is normal in most programming languages.

 

E.g.

 

scores  <- [3, 6, 8, 2]

output (scores [1])

 

would want the answer 3 in the exams.

 

Make sure your students are aware of this – certainly my students took some reminding when doing past exam questions that they need to count from 1 and not 0 in the exams.

 

Paul Fletcher

CAS Master Teacher

paul.fletcher@computingatschool.org.uk