At the chalk face: Tackling GCSE Discuss Questions

At the chalk face: Tackling GCSE Discuss Questions

Exam season is just around the corner… and while students might be feeling the pressure, we know teachers are too! 😅

In this episode of At The Chalk Face, Craig and Dave tackle one of the biggest challenges in GCSE Computer Science exams: extended response questions. You know the ones — the 6-mark and 8-mark questions where students suddenly forget everything they know!

The good news? It’s usually not a knowledge problem… It’s an exam technique problem. And in this video, the guys share their simple framework that helps students turn those intimidating “discuss” questions into a clear, structured answer that can reach the top mark band.

You’ll learn how to:
Break down long exam questions quickly and effectively
Identify the key command words (like discuss)
Use a simple fact → reason → example structure to build strong answers
Help students apply their knowledge to the scenario in the question
Turn a daunting 8-mark question into a manageable step-by-step response

We also walk through a real OCR GCSE (J277) exam question about open-source vs proprietary software and demonstrate exactly how students can structure a high-mark response.

If your students struggle with longer questions, this episode is packed with practical strategies you can start using in lessons straight away.

🎓 Bonus for Craig’n’Dave users:
If you’re a member of our Mission Control community, you can download the frameworks and model answers referenced in the video to help your students practise and improve their exam technique.

Join Mission Control here - 
https://www.facebook.com/groups/craigndavemissioncontrol 

Watch now and help your students turn those tricky extended questions into easy marks.

📺 More help for GCSE Computer Science revision:
Check out the exam technique videos on our channel for tips on command words, high-mark questions and more -  
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCiOXwirraUBkaFcyChfn0DGPPD6n7nvq

👍 If you find the video useful, don’t forget to like, subscribe, and ring the bell so you never miss a new episode of At The Chalk Face.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Exam season is nearly upon us, and those students are going to be getting nervous. But we know you're nervous as teachers as well. Today we're going to talk about tackling exam questions.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Hello, and welcome back to another At the Chalk Face. It's Craig and Dave here, chipper and cheerful as ever, as we enter uh an edge ever closer to exam series. And something that happens every year about FAIL at this point. We see it on the uh the exam forums is teachers asking questions. Uh, I need some help, some guidance and support. My students struggle with the longer answer questions. Um, you know, they're used to them in sort of uh English and other subjects, but computer science, we love the techie questions. We love the here's a bit of binary, do this, but this network diagram. Uh we've seen it, I remember it from my students. I'm sure you were no exception, Dave. There's a there's a nine-marker or a six-marker question, and and then the student's mind goes blank, despite the fact we've taught it all before, and it's not often due to lack of knowledge, it's down to unfortunately exam technique, and you get better at that by training your uh teachers. Training your teachers, well, yes, and training your students. I do apologize, training both, because you know, you don't know what you don't know. So getting the marks out of those questions because they can be easy marks if you know how to stretch them. Well, we're gonna do a couple of things in today's episode. First one is to make you aware of a resource I've actually had available for years now. So this is our YouTube channel, uh youtube.com slash Craig and Dave. You can also um get to it from our main website as well. And if you scroll down to the very bottom, past all the exam board specific learning videos, there's a section called exam technique. It's just got four videos uh that are all worth a watch for your students. They go through a number of important stuff like command words, guidance, but the bit you're after, we're talking about today, is higher mark questions. So there's a there's a nice video on there, six-minute video. It takes a higher mark question and leads the student through how they could approach it, how they could tackle it, how they can break it down, and kind of gives them some of that guidance. So that's already there. You know, signpost your students to that. But specifically today, um, Dave's gonna go through, and I'm gonna pipe in as I always do. Dave's gonna look at a particular type of question, the the discuss question. So again, an extended mark question and how we go about tackling that. So, Dave, take us away, give us your genius insights into how to tackle these questions.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

Yeah, so for context, then just to start off, I'm focusing specifically on uh OCR GCSE J277 and Pearson edXL GCSE1CP2. Okay, so it's just OCR and Pearson that I'm um really focusing in on today. With the um Cambridge OCR J277, we're looking at uh paper one and specifically that one eight mark question that you are guaranteed to get in the exam. That's the one that we're focusing on. And for OCR, it's worth eight marks out of 80. So it's worth 10%. It's a grade changer, it's the one that you really want your students to do well at, and inevitably it's the one that they are least confident at answering. So, what we're going to do is take the advice that Craig's already given in the video, and we're going to just break that down even further into a framework which is going to guarantee success. Now, for our Pearson viewers, if you're doing the Pearson edXL1CP2, again we're focusing on the paper one, and in that paper you will have one six mark question, and it's worth about eight percent. So it's not quite um as demanding in that sense compared to OCR, but nonetheless, it still requires an extended response that the students do often struggle with. And so, what we're going to talk about today is in response to a training session that I actually did for the um Southeast Essex Academy Trust just recently, where they wanted me to focus on those discussed questions and try and help them solve the problem of students not really writing an articulate extended response to that question. So that's what we're going to focus on. In the interests of time, I'm just going to focus on the 2024 eight mark question for Cambridge OCR J277. But everything that I say is going to be relevant for all the questions for that exam board and also for the Pearson LXL paper as well. Now, as a bonus, if you are in our mission control, which is our Facebook group, you can download not only the templates and things that I'm going to be showing you today, but you can also download the model solutions for 2022, 2023, and 2024 papers for either OCR or Pearson. So you're going to have some model responses that we've written using our framework that show you how to maximize those marks in those questions. So how do you get access to mission control? Well, you have to have either purchased 12 months access to our resource center, that will get you in, or you've purchased or you're a teacher of a school who has purchased Smartervise vouchers for the 2026 or 2027 cohorts. So if you're in that position, you've either got smartervise or you've got access to our resource center. You really need to be in our mission control Facebook group where you can download all these templates and model answers. Anyway, without further ado, Craig?

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Yes, I'm just going to jump in before I then let you dive in. There is no further ado. There is one further ado. And that is, you know, we are always giving away all sorts of freebies in that mission control. So if you are a user of our resources, firstly, thank you. But secondly, please join mission control because not only do we give away all sorts of free stuff, it's where we tell people first about what we're doing. It's where you can give us the best feedback as well. And stuff we get asked for in there tends to get pushed higher to the top of our list because we know you're a user of our resources. And thirdly, we're not under the same sort of careful um restrictions or tightrope walking we have to play on the exam board forums. Well, obviously, we can't say too much because we are a commercial provider. So we can answer your questions fully openly and honestly. So please do. Right. Dave, would you like me to share the question?

SPEAKER_02 7:00

Yes, let's share the question. And for those of you listening to this as a podcast, I'm going to read everything out so that you don't miss out. Okay. So this is question four on the 2024 OCR J277 paper. And it says a computer programmer has developed a computer game that they want to release for users to download over the internet. The programmer needs to decide whether to release the game as open source or proprietary software. Discuss the features, benefits, and drawbacks of each type of license for this program, and make a recommendation to the programmer. You should include the following in your answer: features of each license, legal and ethical issues of each license, benefits and drawbacks of each license, eight marks. Okay, so if you do watch the videos that Craig's already made, then you already know how to break this question down from an eight marker essentially into a series of what could be one markers for this particular question because we're given so much detail. We need to have a look at the features, benefits, and drawbacks of both open source and proprietary software. We need to discuss the legal and ethical issues and the benefits and drawbacks. So you can really easily see how this could become, for example, discuss a benefit of open source software, followed by discuss a benefit of proprietary software, and so on and so on. And you could easily break this down into eight simple one mark questions. The problem with doing that is that the command word is discuss. And so it's not state. You're not stating uh eight points here, you are discussing this, and this is where students really come unstuck because discuss requires what we call chained lines of reasoning. So we're going to share a template with you that I've already pre-populated with an approach that I would take to answering this question to show students how that they can achieve this and really not go wrong. The first thing that we would recommend that the students do is have plenty of practice at doing this, by the way. Okay. You can't just do this once or twice and expect students to be really confident with it. No. The other thing I would say is this is going to take me a while to kind of go through this with you. It will take the students a while to do this in class as well. That's part of the learning process. And when you think about it, it's only eight marks. They should be spending about eight to ten minutes on this question. It's going to take me more than 10 minutes to go through it with you, and it would take the students more than 10 minutes in a lesson to do this properly as well. So this is about learning the approach. Once you've become really familiar with the approach, then you can expedite it and get it down into eight minutes. But I think for the purposes of learning the technique I'm going to show you, you shouldn't rush it and you should take more than eight minutes to do this. Okay, so the first thing I would advise is breaking down the product or scenario. Now, this framework will work for all the questions that have been set so far. Some are a little bit easier than others in the framework, but they all work. So the product or scenario here was a computer game. That's the first thing to identify. This is really important because whenever you give examples, they must be related to the scenario, not just a knowledge dump of everything you know. So everything we say is going to be related to computer games one way or the other. So that's really important. That's the first thing students should do. Identify that product or scenario. Then they can copy and paste into the description of the product or scenario box what's actually written in the question as what we would call a preamble or the case study. That is all the words before the word discuss. So get the students to identify within that huge question that we just looked at a moment ago, where is the word discuss? That's your pivot point, okay? Because everything that came before discuss is about the scenario, and everything that is after the word discuss is about what you're going to write. So identify that pivot point, which is the word discuss, and copy everything from before the discuss word into the description of the product or scenario box in our template. Now there's quite a lot of words in there, and so I would recommend as another deconstruction exercise, getting the students to turn that into a series of bullet points. Challenge them to take all those words and rewrite it as a set of bullet points using the fewest number of words possible without actually losing any context of the question. They could use AI to help them with that. It's it's not a problem. But this is about getting to a simplified description so you don't have to keep rereading that scenario all the time when you are attempting to answer the question. So that's the first phase of four phases. Let's now go into the second phase. So the second phase is to create a grid for the question. And I've got a particular strategy that you can follow for this, which seems to work every single time. And the first thing is after the word discuss, what were the computer science concepts that you were asked about? So in this case, it was open source and it was proprietary. And so I have made those column headings for this table. So if we go back to the question just for a second, it says discuss the features, benefits, and drawbacks of each type of license for this program. Well, the type of license was open source and proprietary. Now, because of the way this question was written, it didn't fit exactly the way I would want it to to that table. But it's close enough, and some questions fit a little bit easier than others. Essentially, the columns are what do I have to discuss? What are the computer science concepts here? And they are open source and proprietary in this example. Then in the rows in the leftmost column, that is simply everything in the bullet points. So that's really easy. All these questions will always have a set of bullet points where it says you should include the following in your answer, and then there'll be a variable number of bullet points. Well, for those bullet points, you can put those in the leftmost column of the table. So what you end up with is a grid, and you'll notice something here. The grid contains eight points, which is rather handy because the question is eight marks.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

Can I just add something? Sorry, Dave.

SPEAKER_02 14:21

Yeah, go for it.

SPEAKER_01 14:23

I'm just pop back to your bullets because I noticed there's something really subtle you did there, but which is obvious. Go back to the question. Uh, so we're looking at the the question here, and Dave said in the left-hand side have the rows, and you always have these bullets. We've got three bullet points there: features, legal ethical issues, benefits and drawbacks. And I'll see what Dave's done is pulled out four rows. And it's a classic one because we often get this. Show me the benefits and drawbacks. Tell me the advantages and disadvantages, tell me the pros and cons. They don't tend to use that language in exams. But whenever you see something like that, definitely do what Dave's done here. Um, there are two separate rows. You can't just talk all about the benefits, because I'm sure, as Dave will come on to, you'll end up having a one-sided argument, and the Mart scheme will probably be looking for balance. So, you know, Dave there has gone, oh, it may be one bullet point, benefits and drawbacks, but benefits is one thing to talk about, drawbacks is another. A same with discuss the advantages and disadvantages. Sorry, Dave, I just wanted to highlight that. Three bullet points doesn't necessarily mean three rows.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

No, no, it doesn't. Um, and I equally we've got legal and ethical issues, right? So I could have split those down into two. The only reason I haven't is because I think for this particular question, it's more challenging identifying legal issues that are separate from ethical issues. And I just thought, let's just put all those together. Because at the end of the day, I'm looking for eight points that I'm making here. And so I can fill up my grid to the number eight by just having uh four rows and two columns. So it was it was easy for me to do that. If I split out the legal and ethical, I'd end up with ten, um, because I'd have five times two instead of uh four times two. So I'd end up with ten, which is more than I really need. So again, I'm just conscious of the time that I've got, the number of marks available, and and for me, this felt felt about right. So, students, if you can create a grid like this from the question, you're in a really good place. That's gonna take some practice uh to do. So, you know, practice this with your students, just creating this grid. It's not about populating the grid, it's just about what are the columns, what are the rows. And if you can get them into working in that mindset, then they're gonna be in a good place. Now, I talked earlier about expediting this process because it's going to take a while. Once they become really confident with this, they could just use highlighter pens. I would encourage them to have more than one color of highlighter. And they might, for example, find the pivot point, which is the word discuss, with a yellow highlighter, and then maybe they can identify their column headings with a green highlighter, and they can identify the bullet points and how they're going to split those out with a pink highlighter or something like that. Um, so they don't need to actually create this grid once they become familiar with it. They just need to know what color highlighter is used for which part, and obviously the colours don't matter.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

And there's nothing to stop them then carrying that kind of process through to the exam. There's nothing wrong with taking a few highlighters in the exam. You don't want them spending ages colouring in questions. But I mean, I would tell my students that take a couple of colored by rows, you know, under circle, you know, you can do it twice, circle the command whether as soon as you've seen it, underline then the two things, open source and proprietary, you know, or and put a tick next to the the kind of the rows. And it gives them a visual, because you don't want them spending time in the exam creating these tables in the margin, but by that point, so yeah, you can carry that forward. There's nothing wrong with them annotating and highlighting the actual exam paper as well, just to keep them focused when they're under that pressure. That's a really good thing to carry through.

SPEAKER_02 18:11

Yeah, absolutely. So I want you to notice here we have got eight numbers. Because what we're now going to do is we're going to combine the column heading with the row heading together in the next table. So, having taken that, we are now going to produce our answer framework. And I want you to notice um the leftmost column here that I was just talking about. And for those listening on the podcast, let me explain. What I've got now are eight rows. Uh, they don't quite all fit on one page for those watching the video, but I've got eight rows. And so number one was number one in the table previously, combining the row and column heading. So I end up with number one being feature of open source license. Number two is feature of proprietary license. Number three is legal ethical issues of open source, four is legal ethical issues of proprietary, five is benefits of open source, and six is benefits of proprietary. So I've now got um eight rows, those are six, but I've got eight rows. Critically, and this is how you move a student from a mid-Mark band response to a high mark band response. I've now got three columns for each of those numbers. I've got fact, I've then got reason, and I've got example. And students are going to really struggle with a reason. That middle column is really, really hard. And so give them some sentence starters. If they use words like which means that, or alternatively, they use the word because, then it will naturally flow into what we call a chained line of reasoning, and it will move them from stating things to describing and explaining things, and that will automatically move them into the high mark band. And the final column is the example, and the example comes from the scenario, which is why in step one we identified what's the product here. And the product is a computer game, so we want to make sure that our examples are always related to a computer game. And now all the students do is fill in the table. They've got all the row headings in the leftmost column because they copied that from the previous grid. Now they need to state a fact. So, feature of open source license. One fact is users can access the source code. Now there are lots of facts, and when you will have taught the differences between open source and proprietary software, you will have identified lots of facts and lots of differences. The students don't need to cover them all because they'll write too much, it'll take too much time, and they'll end up with a shopping list instead of a coherent response that builds a chain line of reasoning. So identify one fact. Okay, so a feature of an open source license is users can access the source code. Now, as I was saying, the difficult bit is how you then reason that. So if a student says which means that, or because they can then explain what that means. So, for example, which means that users can make changes to the game. So if they've got access to the source code, they can obviously write more code. Why would they write more code? Well, because they can then make changes to the game, right? So that's how you turn a fact into a reason. And then I follow it on with, for example, and I pick some. Something related to the product. So a computer game changing the source code. Why might I want to do that? Or maybe I want to have more levels. That's that would be a reason. So you can see how we've now got features of an open source license is users can access the source code, which means that they can make changes to the game, for example, to make a new level. Now we've got that chain line of reasoning that the examiners are looking for that will put you in the high mark band. If you do that for every single point that you made, you cannot not be in the top mark band. So let's have a look at the next row. Features of a proprietary license. So users cannot access the source code. Now obviously, a little trick here, a little bit of exam technique is if it's a benefit for one thing, then it's a disadvantage for another, right? You can just flip the argument. So if users can access the source code in open source, chances are they can't access the source code in proprietary. So we just flipped it around, bit of simple exam technique. But so what? They can't access the source code. So what? Well, it means that users can't make changes to the game. So that's your reason. And so well, give me an example that's relevant to the computer game. Well, for example, if the game's got bugs or it's got balancing issues, they can only be changed by the developers because you can't you've got no access to the source code. So if it's completely unbalanced, if the game's broken, you can't change it. The developers can change it, but you can't change it as a user. So hopefully you can see by having this framework of fact reason example, that is your chain. That's the chain line of reasoning. Now I'm not going to read them all out because you can download these model answers, as I've said, from mission control. And I've got model answers, as I've said, for the 2024, the 2023, and the 2022 questions. So you can see how they all fit this framework, some of them with a little bit of jigging, but they all uh they all fit absolutely fine. Um, and if you follow this, you can see that I've got a really deep and coherent argument here. Students will struggle with this. I'm not saying they won't. And if they can't think of something, then they leave a cell blank. They leave something empty. If they can't think of a reason, they can't think of an example-related scenario, just leave it blank. It's fine. You don't need to necessarily have filled out the entire table to get your eight marks here. So give them confidence to write what they think. Leave gaps is okay. And as they gain more confidence and they think a little bit more broadly about the subject, they might be able to fill in a little bit more. This would make a brilliant um sort of like pair-share activity. So have a go at this on your own, then compare yours to your neighbours. Have they got more points that you can add into your table? Then get the pair to have a look at another pair in groups of four, and then gradually build out a much bigger and more coherent and comprehensive answer. And so it can make something that's quite daunting into something that students are quite happy to do because they've got peers to help them with it. So, having done that, um, OCR is a little bit different from Pearson in the respect that you then, for many of the questions, may have to make a recommendation. It should say in the question whether you need to make a recommendation, and in this particular question, it did say that. We might often refer to that as a conclusion, which can get a bit confusing for students because you don't necessarily have to give a conclusion to a discussion question. It kind of depends what the question was about and how you were guided in the question. In this particular one, it said to make a recommendation, which is our conclusion. So we are going to make a conclusion. It you can say anything here, it doesn't matter as long as what you're saying is reasonable. So I've said, as this is a programmer, it's probably an indie developer, kind of made that up, but it didn't tell me otherwise in the question, so why not? So they're uh better making a game for free and getting more community support if it's popular, they could then sell future games instead. No problem at all. But you can write anything here as long as it's reasonable. So having done all that and completed my grid and made my recommendation, the final step is simply to copy and paste. Simply copy and paste. So what you've got in the leftmost column, which was your eight points, those are your headings. So use headings, really important. Then all you've got is a sentence or two underneath each of those headings, which is simply a copy and paste of all the words that you put in the fact reason example grid, but just as one or two sentences. So for example, features of open source license, users can access the source code. This means that they can make changes to the game, for example, to make new levels, as we've already suggested earlier. And you can see how I've done that for every single um point, all eight points that we identified: fact, reason, example. There is no doubt that this is an eight out of eight mark answer. And you're probably looking at that if you download my model examples and think my students can't do that. They can, but they need plenty of practice and they need to become confident and familiar with the framework approach. Once they do that, then they're going to find this much easier. And it will stop them falling into some of those bad habits, which is just writing a whole load of facts that they know that about open and proprietary software, which is not what the question asked for, or for giving irrelevant examples that aren't related to a computer game, which they will often do as well, because they'll they'll just see the question, they'll panic a little bit because it's worth eight marks, and all they'll see in this is oh, open source proprietary software, features, benefits, drawbacks, right! I'm just gonna write everything I know about open source and proprietary software. I remember a video from Craig and Dave. I've got some notes in my uh exercise book. They had a table which was the benefits and drawbacks of each of these licenses. I'm just gonna remember that from memory. I'm gonna copy it all down. How many marks are they getting? Four. Because they haven't discussed it with a chain line of reasoning.

SPEAKER_01 28:37

So and there's no context, they haven't applied it back to the scenario. That that's the other thing that drops those marks in it. Is it's those, I just want to reiterate it's those two points, really, because we see it so much from my students. They they they focus on the knowledge, the theory, they braindump that. Um, and it may well be where they have eight points worth of. As Dave said, there's so many things you'll teach them about open source and proprietary, and they may have eight, ten, or even twelve facts, but because they haven't tackled the command word and they haven't contextualized it to the scenario, they may have you may even look at the mark scheme and go, yeah, you've got eight points, but then it will be capped. It will be capped because they haven't discussed it and they haven't contextualised it the scenario, and that's the bit where people fall out. It's really nice seeing this, by the way, Dave, actually, because I know you've worked on this, but it's the first time I've seen you step through it, and it it's similar but different to my video. So these two resources really support each other. And what I like is it gives the beauty of taking what can look like a daunting eight mark question and give you a framework to break it down to something which is a much more manageable and less less frightening to the students, but also, therefore, if they follow it and get used to it, and as you said, that's practice. Um, they're very unlikely to drop any marks. And when it makes up 10%, wow, hopefully this becomes an easy grade booster now and not the frightening question. Is that it? Are we done? Sorry, I thought there's more pearls of wisdom.

SPEAKER_02 30:03

No, no more pearls of wisdom other than um you need to get these frameworks, right? Um, and you want all our model answer solutions so that students can uh look at how we've done it, apply that to uh to another question, and that makes the whole thing easier. So get yourself over to Mission Control. As we said earlier, if you have already purchased 12 months access to our resource center and you are an active current member, then uh you can join our mission control. If you are a teacher who is using some of our paid content in SmartAvise, maybe you didn't purchase it, but your school did, another teacher did, and you're in a shared class with access to all that content, then you would qualify too. All we need is your email address that we can cross-reference against our records either for our resource center or for smartervise. And if you match our records, you're in, you can join our discussions, you can download our free resources that are exclusive to mission control because, as Craig said earlier, we do use it as a test bed for things. So this particular resource and these frameworks are not available on the resource center yet because they're currently in mission control for people to have uh early access to. So if you want early access to some of our material, you need to be in mission control.

SPEAKER_01 31:22

What a fun place to be. Plus, you get to waffle along to me and Dave all day, which is um no, maybe that's not a selling point. I can't tell. Well, look, thank you very much for joining us. Really interesting actually listening to that as well, because first time I've seen that, and hopefully that will provide you with something to help your students. Right, until next week. Uh, thank you very much, everyone. See you soon. Bye bye.