I'm currently planning a Software Development course that I will be teaching from September. It's one unit from a BTEC National Diploma for IT Practitioners from Edexcel.

I've got a few issues with this course, and its assessment as defined in the Edexcel guidelines. One of the major problems is that the course specification seems to use terms loosely (or flat-out incorrectly), which leads to misunderstanding and confusion among teaching staff. Who knows how complicated it might be for the students?

Anyway, I'm currently planning to teach this module using Java as the programming language of choice:

Centres may choose any appropriate language as a vehicle for developing this unit, eg Pascal, C, or Standard BASIC. Though it is recommended that learners develop programs in a conventional procedural language, a modern language such as Visual Basic could be used provided emphasis is placed on basic programming concepts and constructs rather than event-driven, visual interface components.

It is somewhat worrying that the only types of programming language it considers are "a conventional procedural language", and "a modern language such as Visual Basic". I'm guessing that whan they say "procedural", they really mean something more like "imperative". Otherwise they are ruling out a whole host of language paradigms, including Object Oriented, List and Stack based, Functional and so on. One colleage who will also be teaching this unit questioned my suggestion of Java on the basis that Java is too "OO" and maybe we should teach a pure procedural language (he suggested TurboPascal, I seem to recall). If we do, I pity the poor students we send into the world thinking that they have gained a useful and marketable skill. Heck, I'd rather teach them Perl, or PHP than that, at least they'd be able to use it outside the college.

When we get to the assessment criteria, I'm frankly boggled. Among other things:

To achieve a merit grade the evidence must show that the learner is able to ... use an appropriate tool to analyse a piece of code to ascertain its semantic correctness.

Where do I start? If we had a tool to "analyse a piece of code to ascertain its semantic correctness", software development sure would be a lot easier. The nearest I can think of is something like JUnit, but that somehow doesn't seem to be what they are on about. Any suggestions?