One of the jobs of the Senior External Verifier (SEV) is to write an annual report on each verification group (VG) in their area. I’ve been reading the annual reports for my groups recently. My main verification groups are: 288 Information Technology, 357 Computer Science and 358 Information Technology. The reports made good reading. They were very positive, with lots of improvements compared to previous years. Long standing issues, such as the lack of “red ink” on candidates’ written work,…

I’ve mentioned previously that we had almost established the lead person network (LPN) for colleges, well I’m pleased to say that the network is now complete. We now have a Computing contact person for each college. The SQA Computing team has been using online mailing lists and online groups for a long time, but the recent re-organisation of colleges in Scotland meant that these groups were out of date, so we have been working on getting a lead person for…

I attended the annual Computing at School Scotland event on Saturday, held at Napier University. Computing at School is a UK-wide organisation that aims to promote the teaching of Computing in schools. It is supported by BCS, Microsoft and Google. Saturday’s event was the usual interesting mix of talks and workshops. The keynote was given by Elizabeth Montgomery (HMIe) about the importance of computer science to the UK economy. A couple of the workshops related directly to SQA, including one…