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First Java AP Computer Science Exam Complete
BlindSpy writes "Yesterday, Tuesday May 4th, high-school students all over the U.S. took the first-ever Advanced Placement Computer Science College Board exam based on Java. The exam is given as an opportunity for high-school students to earn college credit in programming. The test is based on whichever language colleges are looking for, which signifies a significant step for Java. In past years, the exam has been based on C++ (1 year) and Pascal (around 10 years)." If you took the exam, what were your impressions?
For C++ you get 3 hours. For the new Java test, you get all day.
The exam takes too long to complete, and requires way too much memory as well. They should go back to Pascal, as it was more efficient.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I don't see how the language should matter in these sorts of exams. Personally I rather have the AP test be questions about algorithms, ideas and concepts. Something like:
1) Write PseudoCode for an AVL Tree
2) Describe the benefits of a hashtable
etc...
No coding, just ideas that a smart student can take to any language, whether its Java or C++ or anything else.
honestly, i didn't think it was that hard. If it was in C++ i would have spent much more time prepairing, but Java is so straight forward that I flew through the test without a lot of studying. Now, whether or not you have a decent teacher plays a lot into this. The questions weren't too hard or too complicated; even the more complicated ones had anwsers that could be eliminated after looking at it for a little while. I'm glad it was in Java-- C++ would have been a lot harder.
REMINDER
It is against the College Board rules to discuss the multiple choice problems EVER in your life, and you must wait 2 days after the date of the test to discuss the free response questions. Failure to adhere to CollegeBoard rules may result in invalidation of your scores, loss of privilege to take future AP exams, and legal action may be taken against you. (Those who take APs should be familiar with this statement)
What's the story with C++ only being the test language for one year?
I took the test five years ago and it was in C++. Did they switch back to Pascal or not give the test for a couple of years? Or (as seems more likely to me) is the Slashdot summary wrong?
Basically, the entire test was over ArrayList and recursion, the two things we spent perhaps a good ten minutes reviewing the whole year. Screw the college board for switching to Java. In fact, screw the college board in general. Basically, there are two questions I'll tell you (there's a lot of lame laws about not talking about the test, so you didn't see me do this) 1. How many times do you want to punch Leon Schram (author of "Exposure Java" CDROM book series) in the balls? (cirlce one) 1 2 3 4 5 The correct answer to that one is circling all of them. 12,345 times. 2. How many fists do you want to use in the acts described in question one? (free response) Basically write something about "all available limbs and body parts"
It was C++ three or four years ago too. So no, not one year.
The test was converted to C++ in 1999. This means that C++ was the language of the test for a full five years, not just the one mentioned in the posting.
When I was doing CompSci (about 10 years ago), they were just switching from Pascal to C++. Many of the files at my fraternity were in Pascal (so much for those "references"). However, speaking with younger students that have worked for me over the last several years, more and more of them have been taking Java instead of C or C++, and many have never seen Pascal.
Another thing that I have noticed is that a lot of students are also taking VB in college, and some of the windows based scripting languages based on it like ASP. I have also seen a lot of PHP experience. This is especially true of engineering, and compsci related courses (not hardcore compsci).
I am surprised that the AP exam for Java wasn't around several years ago based on what I have seen in a variety of school via 2nd hand knowledge.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
The more Java programmers the schooling system churns out, the more work for us old-style programmers who know C and assembler.
You'd be surprised how much the industry is sick of Java programmers, and on the lookout for good low-level engineers, or people who can do Forth or COBOL.
It's the current schooling system that allows me to keep a dot-com salary, so don't change anything for me thank you very much.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I took it yesterday in the morning, as I think everybody did.
Overall, I think it was relatively easy (not to toot my own horn or anything)
Comparing to what i've seen of C++ and it's AP Exam, I _think_ the ease came mostly from the ease of Java itself, and the APPENDICES!
Most of the good heartly case-study code was included, along with a 'cheat-sheet' with method headers for the ENTIRE case study.
I'll get back to you in a month or two with my score, then we'll see how 'easy' it was
Error 407 - No creative sig found
My graduating class was the last one to take the Pascal AP exam. When I got to college, all of the classes were taught in C++, and I started in a second year class based on the AP credit I got from the exam. I was expecting it to be very difficult, considering I had never had C++ before, and it was...for about a week. Then I realized that a Stack is a Stack and a Linked List is a Linked list and once you learn the syntax of the particular language you're working in, Computer Science is really language-neutral.
Computer Science is not about programming. It's about finding solutions to problems using computers, which is a very different thing. Moving the AP exam to Java seems like a good idea to me, but I doubt it will have any real impact on the curriculums of the schools that make the switch. The principles and concepts taught in any decent Computer Science undergrad program were just as valid and relevant 50 years ago as they are today as, they will be 50 years from now.
Bada-bing-bada-boom. The one day project! Massively parallel programming! Now, if only I can find away to harness the power of bajillions of people sorting playing cards in solitaire to crack encryption codes! Muahahah!!!
[coughs] [takes medicine] Alright, I'm okay now.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
What the hell is with all this highschool crap on /.? /. become some place for high school loosers to hang out?
Since when did
Oh, since, well let me think...SINCE FOREVER!
The C++ exam was definitely not only one year in the running. It was for many years, probably 5+ or so, Pascal being supplanted in the mid/late 90s. I took the exam years ago and I think it's a good move to bring the AP to Java for a number of reasons.
The biggest reason is the computer science AP when administered using C++ required students to learn the "AP" libraries. That is, they actually developed their own versions of the important data structures that most people use. I think this was mainly due to the fact that most people see the STL as bloated and under-utilized. On the other hand, everyone uses the Java libraries and this cuts out the need to learn additional code (not to mention that the AP code like apvector, apmatrix, etc. wasn't even written that well).Of course, teaching Java does seem to abstract memory management too much, and this is a negative as a result of moving to Java for the AP exam. However, this is outweighed by the consideration above and the fact that I think it's genearally "more fun" for students to learn Java.
By "more fun" I mean that every student will be able to write applications at home or at school and be sure that it will run elsewhere regardless of what system they have. I remember as a TA for a high school programming class that sometimes code wouldn't work going from home to school to other machines at school (e.g. Visual Studio->CodeWarrior->KDevelop) and often, people who wanted to do more advanced things with graphics were limited by the libraries (though I guess we could've done stuff with Allegro or something of the sort). With Java, there's instant gratification in being able to drop in an import for awt and swing and immediately get GUI feedback.
Finally, because it's most important to learn theory in these courses, Java makes for better teaching in comparison to C++. Stronger typecasting, no multiple inheritance, etc. makes Java a language that is "better" in terms of teaching computer science theory (though it's not necessarily better so in practice).
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.
:wq
The math department head at my high school said I had to take calculus in order to take the C++ class. I said calculus is a bullshit prerequisite for C++ (since, you know, C++ has nothing to do with calculus). She refused to make an exception for me.
At the end of the year I demanded to be allowed to take the test to prove to her that the prerequisites were garbage and that the school was probably too clueless to teach C++ anyway. She couldn't refuse (the AP classes are not mandatory) and so I took the test, although she insisted that I reconsider and that I should take the classes and that I'm otherwise wasting everyone's time.
It turns out that I was the only one in my entire school to show up for the test.
I scored a 5 (the highest score). Came in and stapled that to her forehead.
Spite: it's what's for dinner.
Because people sure aren't learning them from Java. C hackers are getting harder to find.
I just had a thought. It seems to me that the old dichotomy of CS, Systems and Theory, have spawned a bastard child: Vocational Programming. It's probably a natural progression as the field matures. This third class of people in the CS world don't understand either end of the old spectrum well enough to fit in. Java might just be the perfect language for Vocational Programmers.
Now the questions are: Do we like this direction? Is it the right direction? What's broken, what would be better?
Start Running Better Polls
Let's not confuse programming -- the practice of using a computer language to do one's bidding -- with computer science -- the more generic, language agnostic study of computers. That's why the exam is called AP COMPUTER SCIENCE and not AP Programming. I wouldn't say that the use of Java on the exam is a great boom for Java per say, just a recognition that it has many features that are useful, and not available with previouis languages in this exam setting.
I think this misconception causes many students to inappropriately major in CS in college because "they like programming", or "they like computers". And some of them, from my experince at engineering school, end up in other majors as a result. Not all though, but enough for me to feel I should comment...
C, C++, and ASM are low-level languages.
COBOL, Java, and C# are high-level languages.
High-level languages come and go because they are written to solve the problem of the decade. For COBOL it was record management and batch computation. For Java and C#, it's applets, serverlets, processlets, and sandboxed code. What will tomorrow bring?
By contrast, C is still solving the problem of the century -- how to write portable assembly, and assembly is still solving the general problem of computing -- how to get the most processing for the least memory and time. Java and C# can't touch this, nor was this the purpose for which they were designed.
-Hope
All the reasons you dislike C++ are the reasons that I'm a fan. I use many languages, but C++ in particular gives me more leverage overall.
1. Operator overloading - mandatory for best use of templated functions and algorithms. If people make poor decisions with respect to what they overload, that's hardly a problem with the language. I would consider not being able to overload an operator a problem with the language.
2. References are required for any function that returns a "left-hand value." If that phrase does not mean anything to you, then you are not actually discussing C++ references at all, merely glorified pointers. Since left-hand values cannot be NULL by definition, your misunderstanding with regard to their purpose seems likely.
3. Memory mangement is identical to that of C. The addition of the new and delete operators is nothing remarkable - they just call malloc and free. They are also overrideable on a per-class basis if that is not good enough for you. If by "memory management" you mean "takes complete control of object lifetime" than no, C++ thankfully let's you do whatever you want with your objects.
4. Templates are very powerful. They allow with a single declaration the ability to generate code optimized for a given problem. If you are complaining that the mechanism is too powerful, well, some of us like the extra capacity.
5. As for multiple inheritence, I use it frequently. Some types of inheritence are unfeasible, some are unimplementable without substantial performance penalties, and most are simply doable. If you're having trouble, and your inheritance tree is sound, then file a bug report for your C++ compiler.
Genuinely, most of your complaints misrepresent C++ as something it's not, namely a high level language. If C is one step from assembly, then C++ is maybe a step and a half. That's by design.
If I want rapid prototyping, I'll use PHP or Python. I'm not sure what Java gets me other than a sandbox and some friendly exceptions when things go wrong. That's nice, but I don't write weak code, so all that padded insulation does me no good at all.
-Hope
Because people sure aren't learning them from Java. C hackers are getting harder to find.
Good riddance. I'm getting annoyed by this constant assertion that C is the only real programming. It's just inappropriate for most of what people are doing with it.
For any chunk of C code using malloc() and free(), there's a smaller and faster OCaml equivalent that's garbage collected.
For fun, go to the Great Computer Language shootout and download the java, c, and ocaml fibonacci code (same algorithm). On my machine, the ocaml version is the fastest, followed by the java version, and then the C version. Including startup time, the java version is always faster (user and real CPU time) than the C version.
I write enough C, but OCaml isn't the first language that's produced faster code than I've been able to produce with a C compiler, nor is it the first that's made it easier to write reliable apps than unreliable apps.
What I really don't understand is the way people refer to free() and malloc() as if they're some sort of fundamental elements of programming that are required to be taken seriously. You know they're library routines, right? Should I not take someone seriously who doesn't use sbrk() directly in their code?
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.