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In the US, the TI-89 is explicitly allowed on tests administered by the college board

The college board is just the organization that administers the SAT. This is a college entrance exam.

This doesn't necessarily mean the calculator is allowed in college tests administered by a university; they make their own policies. The parent poster said he wasn't able to use his calculator during his first year of college, not on an entrance exam.

At Oregon State University (where I am an undergraduate student) a number of classes will allow scientific calculators on tests, but will not allow graphing calculators (on the basis that a graphing calculator is versatile enough to simply solve equations related to the concepts that the class is designed to teach). Some classes don't have such restrictions.

Whether or not a certain calculator will be allowed in your college classes or not is uncertain; it will depend on the university and the class. I have two -- a TI-82plus and a TI-30X (graphing and scientific respectively).

There will always be outliers. Looks like you are one.

The average increase in scores after retesting is a combined 30 points. That's not a lot.

And for all this supposed gaming of the SAT, the averages haven't gone up over time, and the distributions still seem rather normal at the far right of the curve. You'd expect a big bulge there if it was as easily gameable as you contend.

(The SAT was also re-centered twice, in 1995 and 2005.)

http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/n ews_info/cbsenior/yr2006/national-report.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT

I'd look more but my pc is acting like it's about to crash so I need to send this then reboot.

I'm back and I found this:

2006-07 College Costs
Keep Rising Prices in Perspective

There's no escaping the fact that college costs are rising. According to recently released reports from the College Board, most students and their families can expect to pay, on average, from $90 to $1,238 more than last year for this year's tuition and fees, depending on the type of college.

But there is good news. There is more financial aid available than ever before--over $134 billion. And, despite all of these college cost increases, a college education remains an affordable choice for most families.

The page continues with education costs and financial aid.

Check on the ACM curriculum recommendations. http://www.acm.org/education/curricula.html and http://acm.org/education/k12/k12final1022.pdf

Also the College Board. http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/cours es/descriptions/index.html

Due to the fact that the College Board Computer Science AP test is given using Java, I highly recommend that in place of C/C++ as the language framework for teaching the concepts. Any language chauvinism aside, Java tends to be easier for beginners to grasp since it has far few "dark corners" to get into. Those dark corners are invaluable to programmers who need them, but for learning they tend to be counter productive. My son placed out of his first two programming courses due to AP, though that was a few years ago when the test was given in C++. Java is very much derived from C/C++ so you should have relatively little trouble adjusting yourself. You'll also find active online communities of other HS Computer Science teachers so you can find/share resources there, especially for things such as appropriate texts for the earlier courses (the AP courses should use the same texts as nearby colleges) and appropriate programming environments for whatever your computers are running.

Personally, I suggest that you start students in a simple web environment using a plain text editor, then once the programs become non-trivial, move into either Eclipse or Visual Studio, or at least get a good language aware programming editor. It will take about a week or two to get them used to the environment, but it pays off big time for debugging and general productivity.

Well, it's kind of hard for me to tell you how that'd compare with the best U.S. high school graduates without knowing statistics about how students score on that test. What's the minimum score on those to get into IIT most of the time? 50%? 70%? 90%?

Some background: I'm a college student in an honors computer science undergraduate program at a U.S. university with a top 10 computer science program.

Looking over the questions, they're not trivial at least. I didn't look too hard at the chemistry one because I didn't take AP Chem in high school, so it would be pointless. I was able to understand some of the questions on it just from Chem I back in 10th grade, though.

I did take AP Calculus and AP Physics, so I looked over the "maths" and physics exams. The "maths" exam had very little calculus on it, so that didn't help me. I was able to understand all of the questions, and if I printed it out and sat down I could probably work most of them using knowledge from the logic and discrete math classes I took during my freshman year here. If I was able to dig up my notes from high school (if I still have them), and study and take practice tests for a day or so, I'd probably get about 80% on the "maths", 90% on the physics, and 50% on the chemistry (since I have no background). If I took practice tests, researched the web for further practice material, and generally spent the next three weeks doing nothing but preparing for those three tests like the rest of my life depended on it (which it might for Indian students), I'd get in the 90-100% range on maths and physics and about 70% on chemistry. One thing that struck me as significantly easier about the "maths" test compared to the counterpart AP test in the United States is that all the questions were multiple choice. This wasn't the case for the physics and chemistry tests you linked to, and I'm curious why the decision was made to go with multiple choice for the maths one.

The curriculum between U.S. and Indian schools does not match, so my performance will be lower on those tests even if the schools were of the same quality. This would also be the case for an Indian taking U.S. AP tests; you need to have learned the same material to do well on a test!

Even for the physics test, which was the only one I should theoretically have been prepared for, there were mismatches in the curriculum. There were many questions on optics, which was only covered briefly in my first physics class and not even touched on in the AP physics class. Conversely, the IIT-JEE test you linked to asked no questions at all on rotational inertia, which was a major component of my AP Physics class. We reached into multivariable calculus to integrate over various objects like cylinders, cones, and other shapes to find their rotational inertia. It was very difficult, and but the challenge was rewarding for some of us in the class.

If you want to look at the "comparable" tests in the U.S. yourself, I wish I could give you links to practice AP tests, but we have this big evil company called the College Board that won't let the exams be redistributed online, so I can't. If you register at http://www.collegeboard.com/ you might be able to get practice tests, but I don't know.

The College Board, who administers the test, has information on their site about what the test covers. Another useful resource is the CollegeConfidential forum (The College Confidential company offers paid admissions advice, but they have a free message board that's filled with tons of useful information and people who can probably answer any questions you have.

http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/sat/ab out/SATI.html

The essay portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test does not measure Scholastic Aptitude. According to the College Board, students are given 25 minutes to digest a question, consider its ramifications, develop an opinion, prepare a response, and write it coherently, in a well-organized and persuasive fashion. The shortness of the test, therefore, encourages the test-taker to, respectively: misconstrue questions and jump to conclusions, consider issues only at the most shallow and superficial level, form opinions hastily, forego careful argument construction, and avoid correcting mistakes in grammar and diction in order to get everything down on paper. It's hard for me to believe that this test provides any useful metrics on critical thinking at all.

Out of about 1100 juniors and seniors, 19 took the AP CSci course. She seemed to do well with the kids. My son liked her, anyway, and came home and asked pretty insightful questions. I believe all but two of her students passed their AP exams with 3s or above. So, I'd say their training does a pretty good job of prepping teachers with a lot less experience than you seem to have.

(I confess I grilled her quite a bit at the start of the course, mostly to find out how much help I'd have to provide.)

What I don't know is who picked up the bill for her AP training. The 5-day course I linked to above cost $695, not counting travel to Pennsylvania; and I doubt that covered room and board.

Of course, that teacher just left for a great opportunity in her home state, leaving another math teacher to fill the void. :-( I hope he can go through the AP training, especially if he has no Java or OO experience.

The *average* educational expendeture per student in the US is currently above $10,000 per year.

Not quite: according to a recent release from the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. public school districts spent an average of $8,287 per student in 2004, ranging from $12,981 in New Jersey to $5,008 in Utah.

As amazing as this sounds, it's actually cheaper to go to college - if you look at just tuition, the average cost of college is under 10K

If you just look at tuition, the averge cost of public school education is free. Colleges get significant government support, as well as private grants and endowments, that would have to be accounted for in a meaningful comparision.

Even disregarding that substantial support, at four-year private institutions, tuition and fees averged $19,710 for 2003-2004, over twice the average per-student public school spending. At (heavily subsidized) four-year public institutions, it was $4,694, about half - but a full-time college student spends about half as much time in class as a primary or high school student, so in terms of student-hours it balances out. And we haven't yet accounted for state subsidies to public universities.

Yet somehow, the public school system can't seem to make that happen.

It is misleading to speak of "the" public school system. There are over 10,000 school districts in the U.S., with varying funding, administration, curricula, and levels of success.

My wife teaches math and computer science at a local high school. The AP Computer Science class uses Java (used to be C++). There are two AP Computer Science tests A & B which correspond to one and two semesters of college programming classes. Not all schools in the area offer computer science classes. It mostly depends on the state of the districts budget. Schools in this area depend on property taxes for funding and property tax levies pass only about half the time. 'Frills' like computer science classes, AP courses, music, art, etc. are eliminated when the districts get into financial trouble. Here's (http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/su b_compscia.html) a link to the AP Computer Science A exam web page.

Out of spite, I'll mention that I took the state C++ AP test and went on to score the highest in New York.

I have trouble believing that you were the only person in all of New York to score a 5 on the Computer Science AP test. However, being that you were likely the only one taking the "C++ AP test", I'll have to conceed you may have gotten the highest score on that one.

About 60 percent of students attending public four-year colleges pay less than $6,000 for tuition and fees per year.

$8000 isn't an entire college education, but it's nothing to scoff at. The $2000 price tag on that HDTV set could pay for a quarter all by itself.

Reference: http://www.collegeboard.com/csearch/majors_careers /profiles/careers/106175.html
Quote:


The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the 2004 average yearly earnings of teachers (not including special education teachers) by educational level taught:

        *
            Kindergarten: $44,940
        *
            Elementary school: $46,350
        *
            Middle school: $47,170
        *
            Secondary school: $48,980


Now also consider that they work 10 Months out of the year for 10 hours a day. So that is close to $24 an hour average pay.

Now for the rest of us

Reference: http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/a rchives/income_wealth/002484.html
Earnings

        * Real median earnings of men age 15 and older who worked full-time, year-round in 2003 ($40,668)

Which is on Par with the average salary of a person working a 40 hour week for a full year.

Plus teachers normally get on the average more benefits then the average working including pentions, retirement, and sometimes Tax Credits.

Yes teachers are normally forced to get a Masters Degree and which makes their saleries on the average lower then with people with Masters degrees. But they do have the advantage of relitivly easy to find jobs, That offer confortable living wages, and excelent benefits.

But after seeing the classes the Education majors have to take vs. Engineering or Science Majors, The Education field makes the Masters Degree excuse a little lame. Because many of these Master Courses could be taken for the BA Degree.

So all in all I don't beleave teacher are either UnderPaid or overpaid, they are getting a fair wage.

As for Lack of computer skills I whole hartely agree. Education Degrees rairly focus on Math and Science and teach them as those supid classes that you need to graduate College, Not as important topics (in which they subconsiously portrait to their students). CS110 Intro to Computer Programming should be mandatory to all Teachers, and that Intro to Computer Classes should be Religated to pre-school learning.

Reference: http://www.collegeboard.com/csearch/majors_careers /profiles/careers/106175.html
Quote:


The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the 2004 average yearly earnings of teachers (not including special education teachers) by educational level taught:

        *
            Kindergarten: $44,940
        *
            Elementary school: $46,350
        *
            Middle school: $47,170
        *
            Secondary school: $48,980


Now also consider that they work 10 Months out of the year for 10 hours a day. So that is close to $24 an hour average pay.

Now for the rest of us

Reference: http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/a rchives/income_wealth/002484.html
Earnings

        * Real median earnings of men age 15 and older who worked full-time, year-round in 2003 ($40,668)

Which is on Par with the average salary of a person working a 40 hour week for a full year.

Plus teachers normally get on the average more benefits then the average working including pentions, retirement, and sometimes Tax Credits.

Yes teachers are normally forced to get a Masters Degree and which makes their saleries on the average lower then with people with Masters degrees. But they do have the advantage of relitivly easy to find jobs, That offer confortable living wages, and excelent benefits.

But after seeing the classes the Education majors have to take vs. Engineering or Science Majors, The Education field makes the Masters Degree excuse a little lame. Because many of these Master Courses could be taken for the BA Degree.

So all in all I don't beleave teacher are either UnderPaid or overpaid, they are getting a fair wage.

As for Lack of computer skills I whole hartely agree. Education Degrees rairly focus on Math and Science and teach them as those supid classes that you need to graduate College, Not as important topics (in which they subconsiously portrait to their students). CS110 Intro to Computer Programming should be mandatory to all Teachers, and that Intro to Computer Classes should be Religated to pre-school learning.

Girls are not passing boys in the SAT math. In fact, boys are still getting better grades in both the Verbal AND Math sections of the SAT and have been doing so since 1972. Despite all the advocacy, the gap has increased in the verbal section and remained about the same in the math section.

Verbal (male - female)
1972: 531 - 529 = 2
2005: 513 - 505 = 8

Math (male - female)
1972: 527 - 489 = 38
2005: 538 - 504 = 34

http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/n ews_info/cbsenior/yr2005/2005-college-bound-senior s.pdf

If the author is really as smart as he asserts himself to be why didn't he test out of the introductory engineering courses? The College Board offers advanced placement (AP) tests on a variety of subjects that are graded on a 1-5 scale (5 being the best). Most universities in the US will grant you college credit if you do well enough on the AP test (3-5, depending on the school and/or test). At my high school your GPA was only part of the metric used to determine how "smart" you were. AP scores were a lot more useful.

How many privately funded parks are there in your community?

Well, if you count neighborhood associations as "private" organizations, as I do, then there's almost two dozen scattered about town. They also do their own walks and bikepaths. And that's in addition to the municipal ammenities I've mentioned.

As soon as you fund it with taxes, you're forcing someone else to pay for it who doesn't want it. It doesn't matter what the thing is. It could be a park or a road or a library or wifi. Forcing someone else to pay for something that you want is theft.

And here we are; at the root of it. Libertarian, are we?

You may want to define taxes as theft. I won't. I define taxes as contribuitions to community resources. If you benefit from it, you should help pay for it, whether you want to pay or not, e.g. taxation.

If your money is your most important asset, fine. Protect it by voting with your money and your feet.

I would say my most important asset is my community. It attracts businesses, including one that employs me (for good money), and more that offer goods, services, or entertainment. It attracts them using many tax funded projects. My community also provides quality police and fire services that protect my personal safety, and my private investment in property and goods, as well as my tax investment in schools, roads, parks, and libraries. Some of those taxes also pay for this protection.

But theft is still wrong.

It's simply not theft. It's private contribution to shared public resources.

Moreover it's not effective.

This education-related example contradicts that unfounded assertion.

Forcing someone to pay for something that you want means that they're not free to pay for only the things that they want. Multiply this by a community and businesses that might be sustained because there's a population that wants their services can't run.

Huh. Well, where I live, the local government is dominated by local business owners, and they tend to favor funding a variety of community enhancements. They seem to be under the impression that attracting more development investment with a higher quality of life will net them additional business profits, and also gives them a nicer place to do business. Perhaps the actual math isn't on your side, eh?

This might be tolerable if the public provision of things was efficient. But it's not. The government is the highest cost producer.

Sorry, it just isn't the case. And one economist's opinion is an absolutely meaningless datapoint in the argument. Funny how he rails on education, which seems to be actually getting better results (i.e. from my example) with additional funding in the last 10 years.

Additionally, the illusion of a free lunch results in over consumption.

Your link leads to a worthless and flawed straw man analogy. If it's not based on actual cited data, it's not worth the bits on the wire to me. So don't bother.

I could be wrong about this next part,..[snipped list]

As a network engineer and planner for a privately incorporated telco, and as a broadband consumer myself, I'm familiar with this list of complaints. They're common and have little to do with anything.

For what it's worth, the muni wireless I get at home costs 62% less than my cable broadband did, with an indiscernible connection quality difference, even at peak utilization times.

Especially after all of the for profit wifi providers have left town.

And, of course, there's a whole slew of them beating down the door of every town.

Who said I was trolling? You are trying to compare the salaries of those that do and not not go to college. Maybe you should try comparing the fact that without a college degree your more likely to be doing labour jobs where with a college degree you are going to be doing office jobs. Nothing like busting my back every day for a 30K/year salary without a degree compared to sitting in a nice office making 70k/year with a degree.

This arguement even use to work in the tech industry. "You don't need a college degree to become a programmer" was the old saying. Go try finding a tech job (in the US) without at least a bachelors in CS or MIS. You are thrown out the door.

I strongly recommend you reading Education Pays 2004 before you come on here telling the slashdot world that a college education is not worth it. What is funny is that you just look at the money made after, and not even the social experience of college.

Maybe we need to upgrade that slogan? "The world needs burger flippers too"

I agree that the concept of sending dues to a random PO Box is shady, but the 1520 mark is not too far removed from the 99th percentile reality in the eyes of the College Board, at least for 2003: http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/n ews_info/cbsenior/yr2003/pdf/table_3b.pdf.

Uphill both ways, right? You must have gone to college a loong time ago, or possibly in some more civilized country than the U.S.

Let's see how realistic that approach would be today:

Assuming she works double shifts every weekend of the year, that's $5.15 * 32 hrs * 52 weeks = $8569.60 annual income. (The cost of her stunted social development is difficult to quantify, so we'll elide that.) According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition, fees, room, and board for the 2003-4 school year at a public institution exceeded that income by $2066.40. (Private schools' costs averaged over three times that income.) Bear in mind that tuition, fees, room, board hardly comprise the entirety of even the thriftiest student's expenses.

The cost of higher education in this country is not a problem that can be solved with plainspoken patronizing platitudes prefaced with "Why, back in my day..." No one should have to live like an indigent in order to afford college.

P.S. Student loans are just about the best credit deal most people will ever be offered in their lives.

and take another look at the SAT Acceptable Calculators policy.

SAT II Math IC & IIC even require them. And my TI-89 may not have the storage of the iPod, but it has a hell of a lot more functionality and programmability.

All that being said, it sounds like these students had them out during the verbal section - which is not allowed. Just wanted to point out why all blanket statements are bad... including this one. ;-)

The problem with this reasoning is that these are "invented facts" as opposed to "discovered facts."

Except that most of the information on the AP CS exams aren't invented facts. They are basing the questions off parts of a standardised language, which they most certainly didn't create. I suppose the exact, verbatim text of the questions might be copyrighted, but that wouldn't apply to the fact that they asked you a question about a certain fact (does anyone even remember the verbatim text of test questions? I know I almost always just remember what a question covered, not the exact wording used).

You might be able to make a case for the Case Study code, since it's not part of the standard, but that's it. And even that's tenuous, what with the Case Study being released to the public and used in CS curriculums all over the US. It's available for download from the College Board site, and I know for a fact that the code came with one of the editions of CodeWarrior.

The only thing the College Board could sue you for regarding the case study would be for republishing verbatim code without their consent, but that wouldn't bar one from talking about the Case Study, only from copying the exact code used. And even there, fair use guidelines apply. I could be wrong about the exact number, but IIRC, fair use allows for up to 10% of the original material to be copied and requires that the work be used for certain purposes (i.e. comment, criticism, and parody--comment certainly applies here).

I took the test freshman year (three years ago), when it was still C++, but one can probably assume that the material on the test did not change substantially when the language did. Beyond just the language itself, the test did cover basic data structures: stacks, vectors, queues, linked lists, binary trees, and hashtables. And low-level implementation was indeed part of the test: I remember having to code linked lists and to implement other structures as modified linked lists. We wouldn't have to write our own hashing functions, but we did have to be familiar with the concept of what a hashing function did. Other topics included sorting, recursion, Big-O, etc. All in all, I think the test itself did a decent job of teaching CS fundamentals rather than just the language (although not everyone in my class derived that lesson, or any lesson other than "pointers suck").

The college board site has more information about the test (free.reg.req. for the juicy stuff).

Even more disturbing is this policy

I took the AP AB Computer Science exam, which covers all that would be covered in the first year of a college level CS class, as opposed to the A exam which just covers just one semester. Most CS classes in high schools are just A level, so taking the AB involved doing stuff on my own (ick).

Before this class, I had been programming for a while, and was self-taught in QBasic, C, C++, Perl, some Java, and Python. So my perspective might be a bit on the 'too easy' side.

That said, I thought the exam was really well done. It covered simple things (giving a 'mystery' method and making you figure out what it does) up to more complicated things (binary trees, recursing through them). Something else they covered, which I think is critically important, and also think wasn't covered under C++, is the efficiency aspect of programs. Some questions would ask which is more efficient, quicksort or insertion sort (easy answer), while others would get a bit harder, giving the runtimes of two unknown sorts on a random array and on a sorted array, and making you figure out which sorts they used. All efficiencies were in 'Big O' notation, not being as in-depth as Art Of Computer Science, but what can you expect from high school students?

Also, there was a marine biology case study which was a larger body of code to deal with and worked our abilities to deal with things that we can't see the source for. This was also present in the C++ version of the AP exam.

He is not joking, you can read it on their site.

If you take Calculus in high school, you won't need to take Calc 1 in college. You can take the College Board's AP exams and get credit most schools will accept. Even those that don't will accept an exemption. And if you don't do well on the test, you probably
A. Didn't listen/get people's advice.
Or
Have a bad teacher, which if you go to a small school, you should have know about and prepared for in advance.

I intend to take 3 calculuses in highschool. Yes, the NC School of Science and Mathematics offers Calc 3. For free, too.

I have no doubt that our primary education is at fault for the lack of strong math, science and analytical thinking skills in the US, and the institutions are colluding to dumb-down our students in math and science every day.

Case-in-point: Our single most important indicator of student ability, the S.A.T., is administered by a unabashedly profit-driven agency, the College Board. The Board has proposed a major revision to the test beginning in 2005 which will raise the total points possible to 2400 by tacking on an essay and a grammar section, while eliminating analogies (the closest thing to a real 'logic' quiz on the verbal section) and quantitative comparisons. The claim is that this shift is designed to (*cough* increase fees *cough*) better address learned knowledge of students, rather than raw ability (the test was initially intended to be sort of a IQ test you could prepare for).

So what are we saying to kids? 2/3 of the MOST important indicator of student ability tests language (and just white america's OWN language!)? 2/3 of your time as a student should be devoted to learning how to read and write in english? Is it really that hard, or important, to test students on the ENGLISH language as a primary indicator of their potential? The fact is this: schools are increasingly prone to test what they know students are good at, and what better way to soften up scores than add an entire section which, by nature, must be graded on complete subjectivity? Schools *know* they cannot teach math/science well, perhaps due to students' reluctance to embrace the subject, perhaps due to the pathetically low salaries and disrespect the average american pays to primary school teachers...so they just test what students are good at, and do it in a way that is so fluid that they can literally raise the scores of a nation with this "essay dial" whenever they need to answer to the neo-conservatives and the bitching liberals.

Bullshit, from the collegeboard website:

Calculator Policy You may use almost any four-function, scientific, or graphing calculator on the SAT I and Math Level IC, and Math Level IIC Subject Tests. You are not permitted to use:

* Hand-held minicomputers or laptop computers
* Electronic writing pads or pen-input devices
* Pocket organizers (PDAs)
* Calculators with QWERTY (typewriter-like) keypads
* Calculators with paper tape
* Calculators that "talk" or make unusual noises
* Calculators that require an electrical outlet

The bolded entry is why the Ti92 is banned and the Ti89 is not.

This depends on what you consider good. There's two sections, and you get a score between 200 and 800 on each. It's designed to have a median score of 500 and a standard deviation of 100. That means something like half of all the people that take the test get below a 1000. Sure, that may not be saying much in a US school full of "illiterate crackheads," but if your score has 4 digits in it, you did better than most. And that's today. Back in the day, before the recentering, the medians were around 420 verbal and just under 500 math.

So, if you're comparing yourself to the incoming class at MIT, 1220 isn't so good. If you're comparing to the population in general, a lot more people get below 1220 than above it (81% in fact).

Here's a PDF of percentiles corresponding to various scores. In case you hate PDF files:

Score____Percentile
1400_____96
1300_____89
1 220_____81
1000_____44
900______27

the fees for the SAT I: Reasoning test are $26, not $50.

I recently started work for a small comany that has a pretty solid core staff of people that have an average tenure of about 5 years. As part of my interviewing process, I was introduced to a standardized test that one of the executives had recently learned about, taken, and felt was an excellent measure of an individual's professional and personal fit in the organization.

While I don't tend to put much stock in most standardlized testing, I am currently sitting at my desk at said employer and must, therefore, acknowledge that the process played some part in my receiving an offer.

The push now is to apply the test to everyone in the organization, to pick out common themes of people who've been part of this company for some time.

While I'm not sure this would have any bearing on assessing someone's performance in a technical role (there are some reasoning aspects to the test) it will help to ensure that there is a sanity check as to who is a good fit moving forward.

Perhaps this is one way to address the issue, as someone who gets along with peers and can relate to them, is more likely and willing to mold into the culture of the organization.

He's probably more worried about someone using it for their own AP Speech class, not a real copyright violation.

I doubt it, since there is no AP Speech.

Information is at College Board. I just finished my BS in CS -- took twenty years to do so with time off for good behaviour. Had I not clep'd out of 21 credits, I'd still be going.
The only reason I finished the degree is to get the *next* job -- many HR departments use keyword filtering on their resume databases and I want to make sure I don't get lost because I didn't have a degree.
That argument is moot if you are good, and have a good headhunter and the economy allows companies to afford their services.

SAT is a test most college bound junior/seniors take, and the score is used to apply to colleges. It has two sections, math and verbal (reading and vocabulary, no writing). The score is out of 1600, and I believe the national average is around 1,000.

Collegeboard.com has even more info on it if you want.

I'm wondering how many people here are in or recently graduated from high school and thus know just how Advanced the AP courses in general are. Take a look at the information on Exam Scores at the Collegeboard website. According to them, a score of 5 (the highest score) indicates that the student is Extremely well qualified in the subject.

Now, guess how well students have to do to earn a coveted 5? The cutoff varies between subjects and changes from year to year, but it is quite common for the cutoff to be around 65%. From the Collegeboard site:

You may be very surprised to see that your composite score can be two-thirds of the total possible score and you could still earn a grade of 5! Earning that score on other exams might translate to an "F" at worst and a "D" at best.

The cutoff for Computer Science AB is always one of the lowest. I don't have citations for these numbers, but the year I took the test (1998, my sophomore year) the cutoff was about 55%. So any student that can show he/she has mastered just more than half of the material is considered Extremely Well Qualified. The funny thing is only about 10% of the people who took it got a 5 (indeed, that is how they determine the cutoff - something like "top 10%").

So now they want to teach it in Java. I hope this causes Apple or someone else to develop some resemblance of a decent Java VM for the Macintosh because so many schools use Macs exclusively. Right now the Netscape and the Metrowerks VMs are abysmal...

I met a person in college who said his high school's AP Computer Science course consisted of nothing but playing Need for Speed III the whole semester. He took the AP test and got a 1, but got an A for the course, which boosted his GPA enough to make him valedictorian of his class...

-Albert Mao

http://www.collegeboard.com/ap/com puter-science/

My AP CS course at Ithaca High School was so hard, that we all easily got high 5s on the exam, it wasn't that boring.

Here is a link to the current exam description.

If nothing else taking CS courses in High School will allow you to test out the water before applying to colleges like CMU CS. Just look at the AP AB curriculum. My High School in addition to that has a second year course (the first year course being the AP CS AB) which teaches system level programming for UNIX in the first semester; motion description, ray tracing, lighting/shading, and animation (i.e. 3D graphics in general) in the second semester.