First Year Courses in IT: A Bloom Rating

Abstract

This paper explores the cognitive difficulty of assessment tasks in six first year computing courses within an Information Technology (IT) degree. Bloom’s taxonomy is used as an analytical framework. A Bloom rating is calculated for each of the courses involved in the study and the results are presented and analysed. A wide variation in the cognitive level and style of assessment is revealed. These results are also compared to those from an earlier study and a reduction in the cognitive level of first year programming courses in this study is detected.