BCS Written Computer Science case studies
BCS Written Computer Science · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The BCS Written Computer Science examination is a descriptive, essay-style assessment used by the Bangladesh Computer Society (BCS) as part of its professional certification for computer science professionals. It is intended for graduates and practitioners who need to demonstrate a broad, structured understanding of computing rather than narrow coding skill. The BCS Written Computer Science case studies are 5 cases and about 2,133 words.
1Sizing a Records Digitisation Pipeline Under Storage and Throughput Constraints
A district office must digitise 4.2 million paper records before a statutory deadline in 300 working days. Each scanned page is stored as a 300 DPI greyscale TIFF averaging 1.8 MB, plus a compressed PDF derivative averaging 220 KB.
406 words, about 2 min2Choosing a Data Structure for a Real-Time Fare Ledger
A transit authority processes 2.5 million fare taps per day at peak bursts of 4,000 taps per second. Each tap must be matched to a card balance within 150 ms.
438 words, about 2 min3A Government Portal Rewrite: Language and Build Choices Under Procurement Rules
A ministry's citizen-services portal is being rewritten. The existing system is a 12-year-old PHP monolith with no automated tests.
428 words, about 2 min4Index Design for a Land Registry Query Mix
A land registry table holds 40 million parcel rows: parcel id (primary key), district code (about 600 distinct values), owner national id, registration date, status (5 values, heavily skewed toward 'active'), and a free-text remarks column. The three dominant queries are: (a) fetch a parcel by parcel id; (b) list parcels for a district filtered by status and sorted by registration date; (c) count active parcels per district for a monthly report.
454 words, about 2 min5Segmenting a Ministry Network After a Lateral-Movement Incident
A ministry's flat /16 network connects 1,800 staff PCs, a public-facing web server, a payroll system, and a database holding citizen records. An incident review found that an attacker who compromised one staff PC reached the citizen database within 40 minutes.
407 words, about 2 min