This course has a Bloom rating of 3.9

This paper analyses the cognitive difficulty of six courses that may be taken as credit towards an IT degree offered by a regional Australian University. The assessment requirements of these six courses are evaluated using Bloom’s taxonomy and from this a difficulty metric, called here a Bloom Rating, is computed for each course. The analysis reveals that some quite lowly courses in terms of their ordering in the programme, such as first-year programming, are comparatively high in their cognitive demands, whereas some of the more advanced non-programming courses have relatively low levels of cognitive difficulty. An explanation for these trends is offered.