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Appendix #2 CSEC INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
The following are comments and concerns on the proposed syllabus as submitted by Mr W
Wilson, Curriculum Officer. Attention is drawn to Mr Wilson concern with the non-inclusion

of the curriculum department in the review processes.

1. PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE CONCERN
Teachers may need training before they are equipped to teach Visual Basic for Applications

(VBA).

Students have the option of using either VBA or Pascal to complete the SBA programming
section. Would providing this option not cause issues when setting programming items. This
is discussed later in more detail.

Student who opted to do VBA must have access to MS office. This may limit the time for
students to work on their SBAs as a number of them may not have MS Office installed on
their computers at home, so they would only be able to work on their SBAs at school.

Selecting VBA as a programming option for CSEC IT SBA ties all territories to MS. With
the current situation it may not be possible to always meet the payments for schools to have
access to MS Office. In addition, VBA functionality cannot be accomplished within the
webapp. It will need to be done in the desktop versions. This means that CXC is forcing all
territories to invest in MS for all schools and IT students.

2. SYLLABUS CONCERNS

Section 5 Spreadsheets

Specific objective 7 Manipulate data in a spreadsheet;
Under content pivot table. What do students need to know? In the SBA mark scheme, it states
"Use of pivot tables to summarise a large group of data". What is considered a LARGE group
of data to be part of a SBA? It is the opinion of the ICT Curriculum Officer that the concept
of pivot tables is a CAPE topic and NOT a CSEC topic.

Specific objective 9 Manipulate one or more worksheets.
Content is not clear if the worksheet needs to use data from a different worksheet. It is only in
the SBA mark scheme that it states the content is "to link cells in different sheets". This

should be indicated in the Specific objective 9 content.

Section 8 –Program Implementation

Specific objective 4 declare variables and constants using Elementary data types;

Content: Data types: integer, real/double/float, character, string and Boolean/logical

Declaring variables and constants will depend on the programming language selected. Giving
students the option of using either VBA or Pascal may cause issues when setting
programming items. For example, VBA does NOT have a character data type or a repeat until

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