When students are faced with a research task, a common strategy for weaker students is to just “google it” and take notes on the first few search results. Another poor strategy that affects IB Computer Science students is to exclusively revise from one IB Computer Science website, on the assumption that everything on it is correct.
While examining this year’s Case Study, “A new computer aided dispatch system for Bangbai”, I found that a great many students were giving the same, wrong answers to some of the questions. In some cases students were giving the same answers, word-for-word.
I decided to see if I could find where these answers were coming from and I tracked them down to one IB Computer Science website. Reading through the case study notes on that site, I found a whole range of notes that were quite wrong. It is bad luck that a question came up this year on which this website’s notes were particularly bad. I won’t reveal the question or the name of the site but suffice it to say that I have awarded zero marks to literally hundreds of students this year because they wrote down, word-for-word, what was written in the case study notes of this website.
To students, please use a range of sources and cross-check them. Make sure in particular that the definitions you find are correct in the context of the case study.
To teachers, please continue to share your notes online, but be as careful as you can to make sure they’re correct and urge students to use a range of resources.
IB Computer Science 