Exam Timing: 90 minutes to get 130 marks. That is 0.6 marks per minute. Times below give a tiny bit at the end for looking over your paper. Section A: 36 minutes for section A. Attempt all 12 questions regardless of only being marked out of 9. That is 3 minutes per question. Section B: You have 45 Minutes for sec B. So spend spend 25 minutes on 2 questions. Spending 18 minutes attempting all 3 questions should only be for those who are S-Tier Cyborgs. However when you do 2 (as most people do), choose your 2 carefully. Stop and take a full 2 minutes look through all the little parts of the three questions. Your favorite topic might not be the easiest that year. Not all questions are equal in difficulty. - Always write in bullet points and full sentences avoiding words like "it". - For any advantages/disadvantages or comparisons, remember STEM Safety Time Easy Money Eg. Compare Cloud vs Local storage ✅Cloud is safer because it's in temperature controlled server room ✅Local is safer because if your subscription to the cloud service is cancelled, you don't loose data. Weirdly BOTH of these are correct depending on what reason you give along with your answer! Students only mess up by forgetting what headings to compare things under or not giving a reason for their answer. Section C Python Comments: Include comments in your section C. Especially if you attempted something and didn’t get it working. Any valid attempt was rewarded. Broken code: Don’t submit broken code that doesn’t run. Instead just comment out the broken section and label accordingly. Attempt all parts. A lot of students didn’t even show an attempt for certain parts and they automatically got zero. Any valid attempt is worth demonstrating to the examiner.

Section C is usually: -Print -Comment -Input -If else -Add to List -Change List Items -Use a for loop to iterate through the list and do something with them (like a linear search). -Sort a list from highest to lowest. -Say the lowest or highest list element eg. (listy[0]) -Functions: Doesn't always come up but know how to pass something into a function and return it. A good tactic is to get the python reference guide cheat sheet for the exam and go through it from start to finish ticking off what you can do. They probably won't ask anything that's not on that sheet somewhere. You don't want the exam to be the first time you look at that sheet.

@@DanielMurrayMakes will the marking scheme be very harsh this year as the whole country did well?

​@@David-wn8xo Coursework had ALT3 Simulation for the first time this year so that might have been tricky for a few people. I know a few who didn't attempt the advanced requirements. It might balance out with the exam. I'd rather the coursework be harder than the exam because at the end of the day, if I was hiring a developer, I'd rather they be able to stick to a timeframe and deliver on a project than convert binary numbers. If I had a magic want it'd be 100% coursework.

Advantages and disadvantages of Machine Learning came up in 2022 (Q2). I'd imagine with GPT being all the rage they might ask something about it this year. Cryptography might come up as one of those "sunday lunchtime puzzles". There's usally one of those as a short question each year which you could put under the heading of computational thinking. That said, they're kind of hard to study for so you won't get the same "marks per minute of study" doing puzzles as you might learning how to convert from binary to hex to decimel.

​@@DanielMurrayMakeswhat sections have the best marks per minute of study??

Text file read/write has not come up before but the word on the street is that the python guide was updated slightly this year and one of these tweaks was about reading files so now everyone is loosing their shirt over it. I've not done a comparison between the two guides but I'd defo spend 10mins reading and writing from a file in python just in case. It's not that hard to do so worth a look I'd say. It's more important that you're good with lists in general as they're always on Sec C. Sorting a list with .sort(), appending elements, getting the first and last element with [0] and [-1] etc.