Handwritten vs Typed Notes For OCR A Level Computer Science Revision

As Salamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh World!

This is going to be one of the rare posts where I don't share any resources (kind of like the rant I wrote about how terrible the OCR spec is which you can read here) but talk about things that may be equally (or in this case) more important. 

Anyway, as exam season draws nearer it's safe to say the amount of time you spend revising exponentially increases. To be completely honest, you shouldn't really be in the note writing phase of your revision at this point. Doing past papers is by far the best preparation you're going to get this close to the actual exam.

However, if you're still trying to grasp a few concepts and are making some last minute notes don't panic, just make sure at some point you DO attempt some papers. Take it from a student who has tried both handwritten and typed notes for this course, typed is better.

I used to write all my notes in Year 12 for the AS exams and while it did make them easy to memorise, it took really long to write them. As far as the theoretical side is concerned, computer science notes are primarily text with a few diagrams and symbols here and there e.g. entity relationship diagrams, logic gates etc. which you can easily commit to memory anyway.

For the A level exams, I decided to take a different approach. I typed up all my notes (which BTW are all on this blog here) and it was so. much. quicker. Honestly, can you imagine writing 30 pages worth of notes when you can simply type them and save your right hand (or left if you're a "leftie") some pain? 

Plus, most of my notes were from past papers and other online resources since all the textbooks are simply inadequate so I could just copy and paste them which saved me even more time! Yeah yeah I know, it doesn't help with the memorising part but with the time I saved in the actual making of the notes, I can take all the time I need to commit them to memory. Also, you can't cross out handwritten notes without wasting space.

There are (as with anything) a few downsides though, handwritten notes are actually great preparation for the exam itself since you'll be writing in the exam anyway. The exams are also 2 and half hours each so handwritten notes get you used to writing for long periods of time so by the exams come around, you'll no longer feel discomfort in your hand.

If it weren't for the large volume of notes needed, I'd probably still go for handwritten like I did for all my GCSEs and even AS level Physics! Handwritten might take longer than typing text but it definitely allows more flexibility on how you layout your notes. It's also easier to draw diagrams which for this course isn't that much of an issue.

Regardless, with a month or so before the final exam you should really be past this stage but if you aren't, I'd strongly suggest you type them to save time for memorisation since this course is so vague, you'd want to take down as much as info as you can because there's no telling what's going to come up in the paper.

I think I'll leave it here before I go on another rant about how bad this course is so as always...

Hope this helps!

All The OCR A Level Computer Science Questions By Topic Resources So Far

As Salamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh World!

As previously stated, my posting schedule is going to be a bit irregular during exam season so despite it being a weekday, I've decided to just share a quick post with all the questions by topic resources I've made so far:

1. Little Man Computer Instruction Set
2. Boolean Algebra
3. HTML
4. CSS
5. JavaScript
6. Structured Query Language
7. Entity Relationship Diagrams

Hope this helps!

OCR AS Level Computer Science June 2017 Exam Papers & Mark Schemes H046/01 Computing Fundamentals + H046/02 Algorithms & Problem Solving

As Salamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh World!

First of all, I think it's safe to say that as exam season draws nearer, I won't exactly be posting on a regular basis. I completely missed last week and wasn't really sure about this week but anyways. Courtesy of one of our readers, I have the privilege to share the June 2017 AS mark schemes. Here's the links:

• June 2017 H046/01 Computing Principles Exam Paper
• June 2017 H046/02 Algorithms & Problem Solving Exam Paper
• June 2017 H046/01 Computing Principles Mark Scheme
• June 2017 H046/02 Algorithms & Problem Solving Mark Scheme

Also don't forget, there's a complete list of sample, practice and past papers in a post I made here.

Hope this helps!