Reaction to Leaving Certificate 2026 Computer Science (Higher Level) by Pat Brennan, Computer Science teacher at The Institute of Education.
- Immanently approachable short questions that covered a range of ideas from the basic to the technical and topical.
- A more manageable difficulty curve in the Coding Section will give students the chance to more consistently gain marks, even if time is tight.
The Computer Science exam contains two separate papers sat in succession; the first assessing their grasp of theory while the second is hands on keyboards coding.
In Part A, students were given 12 short questions and tasked with completing just 9. These questions were immanently doable for most students with little that was out of the blue. Standard elements of the curriculum like trace tables, physical components of computers, logic circuits and cloud servers appeared. The Sort Algorithm question demanded students to be very familiar with the material, but this was a prime area for focus and many teachers will have reminded students to keep on top of this. There was even a very topical question on the use of A.I. in homework assignments, showing how the skills and ideas being studied interact with contemporary discussions. The only unfamiliar moment may have been the use of “controller” in the Turing Machine question, but if a student took the time to analyse what component parts were given in the question any ambiguity would have been quickly cleared up.
Moving into the longer questions of Part B, some students would have been expecting more technical questions like Databases. However, any upset will have been offset by the reappearance of Information Systems, which also appeared before on past papers in a different guise. If students had worked through the past papers they would have been on familiar ground and well able to tackle it. Students who excel at logic will be very pleased with the Algorithms and Computational Thinking question. While the scenario of the Konigsberg bridges is new, those who strip away the surface details to reach the pure logic would know exactly what to do. Later aspects of this section will have thrown those looking for the simply binary approach to answers as questions asking students to “appraise” impacts on culture and society, which forces students to quickly sway into argumentative writing. The Embedded Systems question was not overly technical but did demand a solid grasp of the prescribed content. A little worrisome area for students is where scenarios like ‘greenhouses’ are included which presuppose that students know something about this area.
After a short break the students started Part C: Coding. This section is a speed test in which students not only need to grapple with the questions but also the ticking clock to get everything done. Ideas that seem simple on paper take time to carefully materialise and test. Additionally, some will have been anxious following last year’s paper, in which this section started nicely but had a severe difficulty spike in a single part of the task.
Overall, the mean challenge remained the same but was more evenly and approachably spread out. Students were able to get the Seed Code question started nicely but from question (iv) onwards the modifications became more challenging.
The second part of this task removes the seed text and asks the students to start from a blank position and work up to the finished result. Student will have used every minute given to them on this task, which while not inherently more challenging than previous years was a test of how well they had built of speed through practice.
This isn’t a section where students can just replay previous papers, each one is new, but those who dedicated time to being methodical in their approaches will be happy with how this section worked out.
Students entered the exam with 30% of the grade already submitted and will likely leave confident that they could fairly reflect their abilities.