Eight pages covering the advanced theory Paper 3 examines and the practical work Paper 4 demands.
User-defined data types, file organisation and floating-point numbers
This is the A Level data representation section: types you declare yourself, how records are arranged and found in a file, and how real numbers are held as a mantissa and...
8 questions · 28 marks
Revise this topicProtocols, circuit switching and packet switching
Protocols are the agreed rules that let two computers exchange data, and in TCP/IP they are arranged in four layers, each with its own job. This page covers why protocols...
8 questions · 31 marks
Revise this topicProcessors, parallel processing, virtual machines and Boolean algebra
This topic splits into two halves that examiners keep separate: how a processor is built and how it can be made to do several things at once, and how logic gates are comb...
8 questions · 26 marks
Revise this topicPurposes of an operating system and translation software
This is the A Level system software topic: what the operating system does for the hardware, how it manages processes and memory, and how a translator turns the program yo...
8 questions · 27 marks
Revise this topicEncryption, encryption protocols and digital certificates
Encryption is examined as a set of decisions about keys: which key encrypts, whose key it is, and what that achieves. Students lose marks by mixing up the two directions ...
8 questions · 25 marks
Revise this topicArtificial intelligence
AI problems are solved by searching a graph, so you need to turn a problem into nodes and weighted edges and then trace Dijkstra's algorithm or A* through it. On the lear...
8 questions · 27 marks
Revise this topicAdvanced algorithms and recursion
Exam questions on this topic are rarely about knowing a definition and almost always about writing or tracing the algorithm, so the marks sit in the loop bounds, the poin...
7 questions · 23 marks
Revise this topicProgramming paradigms, file processing and exception handling
Four paradigms and two practical skills sit in this section, and the marks are lost in predictable places. Students define a paradigm as though it were a language, descri...
8 questions · 28 marks
Revise this topic