Much like how the Royal Conservatory of Music assesses musical technique and theory through examinations, i-TOPS (international test of programming skill) determines a coding student’s progress and understanding, and even covers concepts that engineers need to know. The Online Certificate Assessment for Coding is used to evaluate the student’s comprehension of programming concepts using visual coding language.

The aim of the programming assessment is to systematically measure the basic knowledge of the programmer using sequential processing, repetition, conditional branching, and random numbers and variables to measure the understanding of each concept, which can then be identified and improved accordingly within the assessment program. The measured understanding of computer language and logic can be applied to any coding language.