computer science paper 3 case study 2023

External Assessment — Paper 3 #

Paper 3 asks a number of questions related to a pre-released case study .

Here is the case study for use in May and November 2024

Case studies from other years .

The case study for the May 2024 session has not been yet published.

The maximum number of marks you can get for Paper 3 is 30. Your Paper 3 score translates into 20% of your final HL grade, see grade boundaries .

Grade boundaries #

Computer science course has a variety of assessment components. Paper 3 is marked using markschemes and markbands and assigned a numerical mark by the external examiner. Grade boundaries are then applied to determine the overall grade on the 1-7 scale for this component.

These boundaries have no impact on your final grade. However, they may be used to estimate the difficulty of the component.

Higher Level #

IB CompSci Hub

For HL students only , the third exam involves doing research on a topic that is released by the IBO every year.

Here is what the moderator suggests in preparation for this exam:

Higher Level Paper 3 is a paper that demands significant research on the part of the candidate , guided, of course, by the class teacher. When it comes to answering questions, the focus throughout the paper is on the depth of understanding of the subject material. This is not a paper that can be answered successfully with general knowledge acquired through brief encounters with the material, but only through a well-planned course which places sufficient emphasis on the candidates’ own responsibility to research the case study in depth.

It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to plan for this paper a year in advance. One possible way to start is to get the students to contextualize the various terms and ideas , many of which will initially be unfamiliar. Getting the class to construct mind maps linking these terms and ideas is one possibility. Dividing up the additional terminology amongst the class and setting them research over their vacation is another. It is envisaged that research undertaken outside of the classroom will feature heavily.

This paper clearly rewards those students who are prepared to research in depth the various areas in the relevant case study and who are able to demonstrate their understanding in the examination. This should be made clear to

Because this website is no longer updated regularly, please see this website for details on the most recent Paper 3 Case Study: Block Chain Case Study 2020-2021

Note that the 2021 case study is a repeat of the 2020 case study (see the front page of the case study for confirmation)

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Computer Science

from 2023 IB Curriculum - V1.1

by SJI International

Courses offered:

Computer science (sl) computer science (hl), key differences between sl and hl computer science:.

While the skills and activities are common to students at both SL and HL, students at HL are required to study three additional topics in the core, an externally assessed case study and also extension material of a more demanding nature in the Java programming option.

Therefore, the HL course will demand three lessons of teaching time per week as opposed to two lessons for the SL course.

Students at SL and HL in computer science study a common core consisting of: • Four topics (system fundamentals; computer organization; networks; and computational thinking, problem-solving and programming). • Object-oriented programming (Java). • One piece of internally assessed work, which includes a computational solution.

The HL course has three additional elements: • Three further topics (abstract data structures; resource management; control). • Additional and more demanding content for the Java programming unit. • An additional externally assessed component based on a pre-seen case study which may include new technical concepts and additional subject content in greater depth.

Further, specific details relating to these two pathways can be found below.

Computer Science at SL:

1. what is the nature of the subject at ib level.

Computer Science offers students with a genuine interest in computing and software design, the exciting opportunity to explore modern computing theory, practice, and software development techniques.

The subject requires students to employ fundamental concepts of computational thinking as well as knowledge of how computers and other digital devices operate. The IB Computer Science course is engaging, inspiring and rigorous. It has the following characteristics: • Draws on a wide spectrum of knowledge • Enables and empowers innovation, exploration and the acquisition of further knowledge • Interacts with and influences cultures, society and how individuals and societies behave • Raises ethical issues • Is underpinned by a computational thinking methodology of problem-solving.

During the course the student will develop computational solutions. This will involve the ability to: • Identify a problem or unanswered question • Design, prototype and test a proposed solution • Liaise with clients to evaluate the success of the proposed solution and make recommendations for

Whilst students are not required to have specific prior experience, some exposure to computer programming is desirable. The development of algorithms and programs in pseudocode and Java code is integral to the course and students will need to dedicate additional time (guided self-study) during Grade 11 to developing their skills in these areas in order to be fully equipped to complete the internal assessment and programming elements of the course.

2. What will be the approach to learning?

The approach to learning will be fully in linewith the principles described in ‘Teaching and Learning at SJI International’ . Students will engage in individual and group work and we expect them to acquire independent and proactive study habits.

As different Computer Science topics are explored, students will investigate technologies and practices, analyse situations and problems, and present and discuss solutions. Programming aspects of the course will be delivered through classroom workshops and additional guided self-study. Students should be fully prepared to take an active role in their learning, in lessons and in their own study. To support this, various resources will be available via the Computer Science e-learning platform.

Students will have access to, and be expected to fully utilise a range of online resources. These resources will develop and extend the learning that takes place in lessons and workshops, and support students to master the analytical and programming skills required.

3. What will be the SL subject content?

The table below shows an outline of the content and teaching hours for sl computer science:, syllabus content.

The topics that must be studied, including some practical work, are: • Topic 1: System fundamentals • Topic 2: Computer organization • Topic 3: Networks • Topic 4: Computational thinking, problem-solving and programming

Object-oriented programming (OOP) – programming in Java

Internal Assessment – ‘Solution’

Practical application of skills through the development of a product and associated documentation.

Group 4 project

All students will participate in the ‘Group 4 Project’ , a collaborative practical research project based on a common topic. This is completed in November of the first year.

Outline teaching hours

4. what will be the nature of assessment.

During the period of the course,students will experience a wide range of tasks, including:

• Analysing and developing algorithms to solve problems • Exploring computing concepts, system components and design using appropriate terminology • End of topic tests (based on IB questions and marked according to IB standardised mark schemes) • End of year and mock examinations (based on IB questions and marked according to IB standardised mark schemes) • Practical problem solving and programming tasks that develop students ability to put computational thinking into practice • Internal Assessment – students will complete a ‘solution’ in the form of a software development project. They will choose a client and define a real world problem that requires a software solution; a thorough process will then see them develop their proposals, software designs and computer code in order to provide the client with a solution. (30% of final grade)

At the end of the course, students will sit an examination consisting of two papers: Paper 1 – 1.5 hour written paper, examining the core topics (45% of final grade) Paper 2 – 1.5 hour written paper, examining the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) component (25% of final grade)

Computer Science at HL:

1. what is the nature of the subject at hl level.

HL Computer Science builds further upon the key concepts introduced through the SL syllabus and directly incorporates students understanding of the IGCSE Computer Science curriculum, which is a prerequisite to this course.

Students must have a genuine interest in computing and software design, with a passion for learning and understanding fundamental programming concepts and developing real World solutions through the demonstration of professional project management skills. All students at this level need to be willing to devote considerably personal time to complete their IA project and move towards mastering various Java programming concepts.

The subject requires students to employ fundamental concepts of computational thinking as well as knowledge of how computers and other digital devices operate. The IB Computer Science course is engaging, inspiring and rigorous. It has the following characteristics: • Draws on a wide spectrum of knowledge. • Enables and empowers innovation, exploration and the acquisition of further knowledge. • Interacts with and influences cultures, society and how individuals and societies behave. • Raises ethical issues. • Is underpinned by a computational thinking methodology of problem-solving.

During the course the student will develop computational solutions. This will involve the ability to: • Identify a problem or unanswered question.

• Design, prototype and test a proposed solution. • Liaise with clients to evaluate the success of the proposed solution and make recommendations for future developments. • Manage a project. • Evaluate and present conclusions.

At HL level, students are required to have specific prior experience and exposure to at least one computer programming language to a reasonable level. Students who have studied IGCSE Computer Science will already meet this requirement, although it is an expectation that students will have learnt beyond the specific IGCSE requirements. The development of algorithms and programs in pseudo code and Java code is integral to the course and students will need to dedicate additional time (guided self-study) during Grade 11 to developing their skills in these areas in order to be fully equipped to complete the internal assessment and programming elements of the course.

3. What will be the HL subject content?

The table below shows an outline of the content and teaching hours for hl computer science:.

The topics that must be studied, including some practical work, are: • Topic 1: System fundamentals • Topic 2: Computer organization • Topic 3: Networks • Topic 4: Computational thinking, problem-solving and programming • Topic 5: Abstract data structures • Topic 6: Resource management • Topic 7: Control

Additional subject content introduced by the annually issues case study

Object-oriented programming (OOP) – programming in Java (HL extension)

All students will participate in the ‘Group 4 Project’ , a collaborative practical research project based on a common topic. This is completed in November of the first year. 30

• Analysing and developing algorithms to solve problems • Exploring computing concepts, system components and design using appropriate terminology • End of topic tests (based on IB questions and marked according to IB standardised mark schemes) • End of year and mock examinations (based on IB questions and marked according to IB standardised mark schemes) • Practical problem solving and programming tasks that develop students ability to put computational thinking into practice • Internal Assessment – students will complete a ‘solution’ in the form of a software development project. They will choose a client and define a real world problem that requires a software solution; a thorough process will then see them develop their proposals, software designs and computer code in order to provide the client with a solution. (20% of final grade)

At the end of the course, students will sit an examination consisting of three papers: Paper 1 – 2 hours, 10 minutes written paper, examining the core topics (40% of final grade) Paper 2 – 1 hour, 20 minutes written paper, examining the OOP component (20% of final grade)

Paper 3 – 1 hour written paper, examining the pre-seen case study component (20% of final grade)

This article is from:

2023 IB Curriculum - V1.1

IB HL Paper3 Case Study 2022 Genetic Algorithms

Case study 2020 block chain, about paper 3.

The paper is normally written on the same day as paper 2 and has a duration of  1 hour , with a  maximum   mark  of  30 , counting for  20%  of the  total subject grade . Every year, it is a based on a case study or scenario that changes.

Marking Bands

The CASE STUDY 

IB_HL_Paper3_CaseStudy_2022 by Tiberius Hodoroabă - Simion

Genetic Algorithms by 1balamanian

CASE STUDY Questions

Case study student notes.

Write Notes under the following headings

CASE Study Knowledge and understanding:

Terminology guide.

Additional Terminology

Brute force approach Combinatorial optimization Computational intractability Convergence Crossover / crossover operator Elitism Exploration vs exploitation Fitness / fitness function / fitness landscape Heuristic Hill climbing Initialization parameters Local extrema Mating pool Mutation / mutation rate Novelty search Offspring Optimization Population Premature convergence Problem space Ranking Roulette wheel selection Selection strategy Simulated annealing Stochastic universal sampling Termination condition Tour Tournament selection Truncation selection

Lesson One - Homework

Read the Case Study and summarize the introduction section

In your research so far have you come across any protocols ?

What is Section

What is a hashing function.

Hashing functions are mathematical algorithms that take inputs and generate unique outputs.

• Hash functions turn an arbitrarily-large piece of data into a fixed-length hash output
• They are one-to-one: the same input will always provide the same hash output
• They are one-way functions: it's impossible to "work backwards", and reconstruct the input given a hash output.

What is a Good Hashing Function

“The essential characteristics of good hashing algorithms are determinism, noninvertibility and collision resistance.” A good cryptographic hash function is non-invertible, meaning it cannot be reverse engineered.

What is SHA256 Hash Generator

What is  sha256 hash generator.

he SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) is one of a number of cryptographic hash functions. A cryptographic hash is like a signature for a data set. If you would like to compare two sets of raw data (source of the file, text or similar) it is always better to hash it and compare SHA256 values. It is like the fingerprints of the data. Even if only one symbol is changed the algorithm will produce different hash value. SHA256 algorithm generates an almost-unique, fixed size 256-bit (32-byte) hash. Hash is so called a one way function. This makes it suitable for checking integrity of your data, challenge hash authentication, anti-tamper, digital signatures, blockchain. With the newest hardware (CPU and GPU) improvements it is become possible to decrypt SHA256 algorithm back. So it is no longer recommended to use it for password protection or other similar use cases. Some years ago you would protect your passwords from hackers by storing SHA256 encrypted password in the your data base. This is no longer a case. SHA256 algorithm can be still used for making sure you acquired the same data as the original one. For example if you download something you can easily check if data has not changed due to network errors or malware injection. You can compare hashes of your file and original one which is usually provided in the website you are getting data or the file from. SHA-256 is one of the successor hash functions to SHA-1,and is one of the strongest hash functions available.

Online Tool Click Here

what is Immutable transaction

What is an immutable transaction.

Immutability is used to denote something which can never be modified or deleted. In a blockchain, it refers to the logs of transactions, which is created by consensus among the chain’s participants. The basic notion is this: once a blockchain transaction has received a sufficient level of validation it can never be replaced or reversed or edited.

Now let us see how blockchain attains immutability.

If a miner tries to change a transaction from history, he will have to re-mine all the blocks from that block till the current block and this will have to be reflected in every copy of the ledger in the network. Miners will have to rebuild the merkle tree of the block in which the transaction is present and redo all the proof of work for that block.

Now, since the next block stores the hash of this block, the next block will also have to be re-mined. This is because the next block will have to be edited with the new “previous block hash”. This change will result in a different block hash. The new block hash might result in a hash that does not match the set difficulty level. Thus, this block will also have to be re-mined.

What about the new blocks being added every 10 minutes?

The computing power required to achieve this is enormous and probably only theoretical.

what is a trapdoor function

What is a merkle tree ( also known as a binary hash tree ), what is  a merkle tree.

In very simple terms, a Merkle Tree is a way of structuring data that allows a large body of information to be verified for accuracy both extremely efficiently and quickly. They have become a crucial component of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency,

The Merkle Tree has been around since 1979, when a man named Ralph Merkle was at Stanford University. Merkle wrote a paper titled “A Certified Digital Signature” during his time at Stanford, and unknowingly created a major component of blockchain. In his paper, Merkle described a brand new method of creating proofs. Essentially, Merkle designed a process for verifying data that would allow computers to work much faster than before

A Merkle Tree Example

Let’s imagine that there were four transactions performed on one block: A, B, C, and D. Each transaction is then hashed, leaving us with:

The hashes are paired together resulting in:

These two hashes are hashed together to give us our Merkle Root: Hash ABCD. In reality, a Merkle Tree is far more complicated than this (especially when you consider that each transaction ID is 64 characters long) but this should give you an idea as to how the algorithms work and why it is so effective. 

The implementation of Merkle trees in blockchains has multiple effects. It allows them to scale while also providing the hash-based architecture for them to maintain data integrity and a trivial way to verify the integrity of data .

Slide Shows & Lessons

Paper 3 long question.

Paper 3 always ends with a long discussion question. The time is one hour so allow 2 minutes per point, for example if the Long question   is for 12 points allocate 23 minutes. If short question is for 4 mark allocate 8 minutes. This will help ensure you spend the correct amount of time on each question.

=== Long Question (12 marks) ===

- Suggestions for the responses --- … USE TECHNICAL VOCABULARY whenever possible and sensible. … Your response to this question(s) should be 1-2 pages long, depending on the size of your writing. … and it must be completed within 20-30 minutes, as there are other questions on the exam. … Hence, you may only give partial responses to each part of the question. … Be sure to address ALL parts of the question(s), albeit briefly, rather than one part in depth. … Keep in mind that there are no "RIGHT" answers, but there are better and worse answers.

Help | Advanced Search

Computer Science > Machine Learning

Title: transformers are uninterpretable with myopic methods: a case study with bounded dyck grammars.

Abstract: Interpretability methods aim to understand the algorithm implemented by a trained model (e.g., a Transofmer) by examining various aspects of the model, such as the weight matrices or the attention patterns. In this work, through a combination of theoretical results and carefully controlled experiments on synthetic data, we take a critical view of methods that exclusively focus on individual parts of the model, rather than consider the network as a whole. We consider a simple synthetic setup of learning a (bounded) Dyck language. Theoretically, we show that the set of models that (exactly or approximately) solve this task satisfy a structural characterization derived from ideas in formal languages (the pumping lemma). We use this characterization to show that the set of optima is qualitatively rich; in particular, the attention pattern of a single layer can be ``nearly randomized'', while preserving the functionality of the network. We also show via extensive experiments that these constructions are not merely a theoretical artifact: even after severely constraining the architecture of the model, vastly different solutions can be reached via standard training. Thus, interpretability claims based on inspecting individual heads or weight matrices in the Transformer can be misleading.

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2024 case study

• 1 Introduction
• 2 The case study
• 3 Every term in the case study
• 4 Markscheme for case study
• 5 Previous years case studies
• 6 References

Introduction [ edit ]

Higher-level students must write 3 papers. The case study is the third paper. Every year the case study discusses a different topic. Students must become very familiar with the case study . The IB recommends spending about a year studying this case study .

This page will help you organize and understand the 2024 case study .

The case study [ edit ]

Click here for the full pdf case study for 2024

Every term in the case study [ edit ]

• Please visit our programming page to see a list of terms involved in Robotics .

Markscheme for case study [ edit ]

Previous years case studies [ edit ]

• Click here for the 2023 case study
• Click here for the 2022 case study
• Click here for the 2020 and 2021 case study
• Click here for the 2019 case study
• Click here for the 2018 case study
• Click here for the 2017 case study
• Click here for the 2016 case study

References [ edit ]

• ↑ http://www.flaticon.com/

Devote time and attention to gaining knowledge of (an academic subject), especially by means of books

Give a sequence of brief answers with no explanation.