I did Software Development last year and Informatics this year so I was lucky enough to experience both study designs. I'm not sure whether this was just in my school or not, but in Software last year we were given only a couple of periods to analyse, design, develop and evaluate a solution based on a case study for two of our SACs I believe. Everyone in my class struggled as we were expected to complete the development phase in around 100 minutes, leading many of us to submit websites with many faults and in some cases not even full functionality. I can't confirm this for sure, but I heard other schools were given several days to complete their solutions, including permission to work on them at home (which would be extremely unfair if it was true). I believe the new study design with the SATs helps to rectify issues like this, but as some of the previous posts said, most of the students just end up doing nothing until the last week or so. I think it may be a better idea to have some system that's in between the previous one and the current one, so that students have enough time to complete their work, but not so much that they end up leaving it till the last minute. Furthermore, the only 2 IT teachers at my school (1 for each unit 3/4) are both average at best, and don't seem to fully understand either of their respective subjects. Also, the content that we are required to learn is sometimes fairly outdated. As a result of this, sadly I think IT has become a bit of a bludge subject for some students, and I'm not sure how effective it is in preparing us for IT at university (I'll have to find out next year).