How to Write the Higher Apps Project
The Higher Apps project represents 27% of the final mark for the course. Getting a high score in the coursework will take a lot of pressure of the examination.
Resources
- Leckie Higher Applications Student Book – Chapter 10. The final section of chapters 6, 7 and 9 will help you answer the key questions you need to cover.
- Remember to read the SQA guidance. Remember: the mark scheme is freely available and students can and should look over it.
- Students must not be given a perfect example project to refer to. Students may look at the projects the SQA have shared, which do make mistakes.
- The SQA changed the marking scheme after the first year of the course to tighten up some things. Read about what changed, and how I think you should interpret it, here.
- The Open Intro Datasets are a fantastic source of datasets to be used in a project.
Remember:
- Students lost marks in their introductions and conclusions. Remember to answer these points:
- Introduction: Where did the data come from? This is actually two questions: where did you get the data from (is it a reliable source?) and: how did they get their data? If you haven’t said how the data was gathered (e.g. a random sample), and mentioned the words “population” and “sample”, something is missing. For example: “I sourced my data from the Scottish government website. As this is a government website it is likely to robust data. The government collected the sample data by randomly surveying 200 households in the Highlands, as they used a random sample the sample should be a good representation of the population (households in the Highlands).” In order to get these marks, students will need to spend time reading about the source of their data.
- Conclusion: In the conclusion everything needs to be referred to again. The charts, the statistics, the hypothesis test result, the question being answered. It doesn’t matter that you have talked about these things before, you must repeat yourself in the conclusion in aid of answering your question. And again, if you haven’t used the words “population” and “sample” you haven’t answered your question.