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College Board Kills AP Computer Science AB
jhealy1024 writes "The College Board recently announced it will be getting rid of the Advanced Placement Computer Science AB examination after May 2009. The 'A'-level exam will continue to be offered, though there is no word yet on what will become of the AB-level material (e.g., if it will be merged into A or just dropped). Many teachers of AP CS are upset about the move, as it seems the decision was made without consulting members of the CS teaching community. As one teacher put it: 'this is like telling the football coach next year is the last year you have a varsity team.'"
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I took computer science AB when I was in highschool and it was a great class if you looked past the god forsaken code project you had to modify that had something to do with fish. I learned all about algorithms, data structures and other important topics that I would not have gotten formal exposure to until, well, never because I didn't major in CS. One huge drawback is that it's taught in Java now, which is absolutely terrible for learning the fundamentals (I took it when it was C++)
What is the biggest shame is this course was hugely popular in my tech-oriented highschool: Like 50 people took the AB exam every year out of my class of 120 or so. While I understand TCB is trying to cut the cost of making unpopular exams, keeping computer science A is a joke because AB wasn't all that fast and A doesn't even count for credit at my university; It's basically just a waste of time.
Time to bring it back under the umbrella of mathematics where it belongs.
is that outside of the US it's next to impossible to find an AP CS class. So, while interest may be there, it may not be there inside the US and so the College Board runs into a catch-22.
I'd love to see the per year increase-decrease stats across all the AP subjects. It would be interesting to see if it correlates to the apparent decline in the sciences across the US.
CS instructors at the high school level will have much broader latitude in what they teach. You could go a vocational route (say, Rails), or a different theoretical route (say, The Little Schemer).
I also think it's possible that the contents of AB need to both go into A. It's been a long time since I took them both (1989), so things may be different, but my recollection is that the contents of A alone really weren't much beyond pragmatic familiarity with basic imperative programming, the kind of stuff that your basic "Teach Yourself X in Some Ridiculously Short Period of Time" book can actually teach you.
That said, if what they're doing has the effect of dropping the study of data structures and algorithms from the high school curriculum -- if dropping B really means there will be less CS in the classroom -- then this is a really poor move.
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I suspect that this decision won't help the current paucity of valid Computer Science courses in high schools. I'm still annoyed by the number of Microsoft Office or HTML courses that get passed off as CS. On the other hand, I guess it's possible that this could encourage more people to take APCS A (as there would be no real two-year commitment as there can be now), which would be a good thing. Hopefully some of the AB material can be folded into the new A course, as it would be a pity to lose AP-level high school instruction on big-O algorithmic analysis and data structures.
Doesn't matter much anyways. When I got to college the only thing that the exam would've given me credit for was a basic computer class. So I was forced into taking about four classes full of content that I had taken before. Two algorithm classes, a java class and a basic C class that was introduction to programming in general. It's just the idea that they teach as though nobody has ever programmed before. Things would work better if everybody was split into two groups.
I can understand the College Board wanting to concentrate their resources a bit more, but I still don't think that slashing the curriculum is the way to do it. Of course, maybe I'm biased -- my high school APCS courses were great and I don't think we got much of anything from the College Board in the way of support.
I took AP CS A and got a 3 on it. When I applied into college they told me I should take the introductory course because most people who got a 3 on the AP test and skipped it would fail the next step up.
I skipped it and the next step up was extremely easy. When I was writing my review of that class I told them I could have learned almost everything they taught me in that semester in a week.
Just goes to show what trash the grader was on the AP test. They probably thought all of my lower case 'j's were 'i's, and probably marked me down for declaring new variables anywhere but the beginning of the function. To put it in perspective, a 3 is supposed to be the same as a C in college, yet I went through college never getting a C in anything and getting predominately A's and B+s in most CS classes- even the ones with a 90% failure/drop-out rate.
Part of it is that the teacher of my AP class, a female cheerleading coach (no kidding), was a decent teacher and could get you to learn a concept like new data structures or pointers in 20 minutes.
I'm currently enrolled in AP Computer Science AB, and I can say without a doubt it has been one of the most useful classes I've taken up to this point. I'm frustrated and confused at this news. I suppose the upside is that fewer computer science courses will conform to the strict Java-only curriculum, allowing for educations in other programming languages besides Java, such as C/C++. On the other hand, it may just mean less material is taught in high school computer science courses. If I had to guess which is more likely, I'd have to go with the latter.
bring mathematics under the umbrella of cs..
They also cut Italian, Latin literature, and French literature.
As a college teacher, I'm uncomfortable with the place that AP exams now occupy in our educational system. When I went to college, it was considered unusual to take AP exams, and nobody had ever heard of a GPA higher than 4.0. Now, with AP classes counting +1 on the GPA, Berkeley is turning away a sizable fraction of all students with 4.0 GPAs. In other words, you essentially can't get into the flagship schools of the UC system unless you have a lot of AP exams to puff up your grades. In one way this is good, because the old system encouraged kids not to take challenging coursework in high school. But a lot of rural and inner-city high schools don't offer AP courses, or don't offer more than one or two, or they offer them, but they're not at a high enough level to prepare you for the exams. There's something horribly wrong with a system of government that taxes working-class people in order to support public education, but effectively excludes their kids from getting the full benefit of the system they're supporting with their taxes.
Looking over the contents of the CS exams, I can't help getting the impression that this is vocational education masquerading as something more academic. It all seems to be focused on the OOP fad, and on being able to code in Java. Stacks and queues are only covered on the AB, not the A level!?!? The hardware part seems pretty lightweight, and there's virtually no theory AFAICT.
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As someone who took the AB exam last year, this makes no sense. While the AB test is pretty easy (except for the somewhat ridiculous time limit on the multiple choice section), the A test is pathetically so. If you look at the topics for the two exams, the A test really just covers basic programming logic. AB adds in data structures, algorithms, and design patterns like OO, which makes it more comparable to a college-level CS class.
In an era of increasing computation fluency amongst high schoolers, it seems strange that the college board would try so hard to dumb down high school level computer science.
(Totally off-topic, but is anybody else not totally thrilled with this redesign?)
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
Having gone though several international high schools (located across Europe), they all offered CS A and AB.
When I finally took it (A, in Grade 11) it was taught as a combined A/AB class by the school's Director of Technology. It wasn't as formalized a most classes - we simply took over the computer lab and its whiteboards for our classroom - but it was small, intense, and with a smart group of people. We finished the AP spec about halfway through the year, so for the second half we just did a bunch of code projects, only one of which was the standard AP one (this was the year before they brought in the aforementioned god-awful fish tank project). Independently, when I went to (public) school in Canada, AP CS A was offered as well, with the usual caveat that the school board wouldn't pay the testing fees (but would teach a class on it).
If you say it's unavailable outside the US, you need to compare that against the availability of other AP classes - do you mean that the French national school board won't offer them, or that the American School in Paris won't?
Cue The Sun...
The article also mentions the possibility, in the context of the Italian course, of the program being continued if a sponsor could be found. Perhaps Mr. W. Gates and the other hi-tech moguls who are always bemoaning the lack of US workers, and crying for more H1 visas, could pony up a few bucks to support the CS course. I'm sure it would be chump change for Bill.
I don't understand a thing! "AB examination" "A examination" "AP CS" "varsity team"?
Can someone please explain for people outside the US?
No, it's like telling the football coach that next year is the last year there will be trophies awarded at the championship game. They can still have a team, there just won't be an official ranking.
Of course the AP test credit is a lot of the value of the programme, so cancelling the test is a travesty, and might be a reason to cancel the course, especially if students spend their time taking other courses that award the credit they can use.
But if the teachers are making that kind of analogy, they shouldn't be teaching. Not even CS classes, because thinking with analogies is more important to programming than is instruction in language syntax. It's like a football team with a coach who's really just the second-string halfback.
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In my high school, AP classes don't exist. I'm supposed to be going to the best high school in my school district... but we don't get AP classes. It's called the inner-city.
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You stop referencing it, and next time you need more memory, the garbage collector notices and recycles it for you.
The particulars of memory management can be worth studying, but mastering them is not a prerequisite to understanding algorithms and data structures. Sometimes you care what happens to memory you're done with, sometimes you don't. A problem with non-garbage-collecting languages like C is that, whether or not you care, it's still your problem.
Actually, this year, the department of computer science was removed from my high school and AP Computer Science was moved under the department of mathematics. Which really brought about no changes other than our computer science teacher is no longer his own department head.
And the loss of computer science AB will be a huge loss, as I learned a lot in that class. As someone else already said was possible, I did learn most of A from Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days, but B was a lot of stuff I otherwise wouldn't know (or know well). I plan on majoring in computer engineering partially due to my great experience in that class (I also love hardware, hence the plan to take a major between CS and EE). And the Marine Bio Case Study wasn't all that bad; we had some fun projects such as adding sharks in our class. Though that has been replaced with GridWorld since I took the class two years ago.
We've had a rather large CompSci class for way longer than I've been at high school. Of course, it will never be as big as AP US History, but no one would expect it to be. Way more useful, though. Interestingly enough, I also know quite a few people in AP Latin Literature, another course being cut. Our AP French class, however, is only 3 students total. But if our school will keep a class for 3 people, I don't see why the college board can't keep a test for thousands.
I took it in Pascal. Is that better or worse than C++ and Java? Morale of the story is that, as usual, the exact language doesn't particularly matter.
Odd (well not really) that they mention this when the latest problem in Universities is the dropping male population.
... expect to see men on campus. It's not the College of Mary and Mary; it's the College of William and Mary."
So, they kill off the subject with the highest number of boys in it?
The "Boy Crisis," Again
This time from Time Magazine. There is now a real question about whether or not "affirmative action" is needed for boys in admission to college. Much of this fretting will be over-the-top and silly. Still more of it will be directed at exactly the wrong things. But I actually think some of it is going to be useful. For example, notice this comment in the article coming from the Dean of Admissions at Kenyon College who alerted the press to the practice of sidelining some stellar female applicants so as to accept more male applicants. She was indignant: But what most amazed her was the reaction of young women: by and large, they assumed this is just how things work. "Why aren't they marching in the streets? That's the part that slays me," Delahunty says. "It isn't fair, and young women should be saying something about it not being fair."
But her counterpart at the College of William and Mary gets it: U.S. News & World Report found that the admissions rate of men at the College of William and Mary, for example, was an average of 12 percentage points higher than that of women--because, as the admissions director memorably told the magazine, "even women who enroll
Without commenting on the question of whether schools "ought" to work to achieve parity between the sexes in admissions or whether they "ought" to take all comers based solely on their academic merit, I am just amused and pleased to see that there is some real recognition of a difference between the sexes at all! It is probably a healthy sign that the men are missed when they are missing. It gives lie to the notion that all students are the same regardless of sex. Once that is understood, then (maybe) we can talk.
There is no need for CS in the USA. Corporations and now the US government has decided that from now on CS jobs will be done in India, China, etc. not not in the USA.
It's just more effective and better for everyone: decreases the burden on education financing, decreases labour costs for businesses.
The American public generally won't get credit approved after the sub-prime mortgage and the coming credit card, car loan market debt collapse.
As the bigger part of the general American population soon will be officially bankrupt, they will be written off as a potential consumer base by banks and other corporations, which will shift their interest to consumers in new, emerging markets. They will soon move their headquarters closer to their real costumer base.
America will trade place soon, it will be transformed fast into a third-world region. Shortly labour intensive manufacturing will be shifted back there, where uneducated American masses will start working for pennies to supply regions soaked with investment capital, new research and development and financial centers.
That's why America does not need CS education.
Screw AP, here is how I got college credit early: Do well on your ACT (or SAT I guess, never had to take the SAT myself) to qualify for college substitution credits. Try to find out which courses at your local Community College will actually transfer to your preferred university. Apply with your high school and the CC to take those courses for high school credit. Upside: If you choose correctly, you probably only have community college classes two days a week, but only have to go to high school for half a day. Downside: You are probably going to school at night. If you don't pick the courses right, the best you can hope for on transferring credits is some sort of 1 credit in General Science 999999 which doesn't count towards credits for your degree...... (Seriously, I'm lucky I took a Fortran class in addition to my Object Oriented Programming class, since OOP turned out to be... Visual Basic)
I have a friend who teaches an AP science class at a a local high school. The high school produces about half the National Merit scholars in the county despite the fact it's a tiny school of some 200 students. The science department has battled the humanities department for years over whether to keep AP courses or not. The humanities would just as soon see them gone.
A year ago, the science department almost gave in when the AP organization required each teacher to explain in detail how they met the AP curricula requirements. That added another teacher work day to an already harried schedule. She typically works late into the night grading work and the last thing she wanted to do was to spend an extra unpaid work day justifying her course to the AP organization. She figured it was enough that her average student AP score is 4.8 - the hell with how she does it.
Adding more steps to any program guarantees you'll lose some participants. Perhaps that's what the AP board intended with their new regs.
It's time to admit: there is no need for CS in the USA. Corporations and now the US government has decided that from now on meaningful CS jobs will be done in India, China, etc. not in the USA.
It's just more effective and better for everyone: decreases the burden on education financing, decreases labour costs for businesses in the USA, at a time, when America no longer has the required resources.
The American public generally won't get credit approved after the sub-prime mortgage and the coming credit card, car loan market debt collapse which is just at the doorstep.
As the bigger part of the general American population soon will be officially bankrupt, they will be written off as a potential consumer base by banks and other corporations, which will shift their interest to consumers in new, emerging markets. They will soon move their headquarters closer to their real costumer base.
America will trade place soon, it will be transformed fast into a third-world region. Shortly labour intensive manufacturing will be shifted back there, where uneducated American masses will start working for pennies to supply regions soaked with investment capital, new research and development and financial centers.
That's the simple reason why America does not need CS education.
"Adding more steps to any program guarantees you'll lose some participants. Perhaps that's what the AP board intended with their new regs."
No, the College Board introduced the AP Audit because some of their members, the colleges, said that they were seeing too many students with AP classes on their records that were completely half-assed and not even college prep level. The kids took the exam and consistently failed because the teachers were not teaching the exam topics, but labeling regular history as "AP History, take the exam if you feel like".
This was troublesome for both kids and admissions counselors. They thought they were getting a college prep class and/or that they'd be able to score a 4 on the exam, and neither were true. Similarly, the college that admitted them thought that they were either not so smart for failing that AP exam or thought they had a much more rigorous high school career than they did.
It would appear they didn't even consult or even inform the group of people who prepare the curriculum and write the exams either. Clearly, they had already made up their mind to ditch it and didn't want to inconvenience themselves with a justification of it. Ah well, I guess AP/A will now tank, and districts will go "Hmmm, AP/A wasn't getting our kids any college advantage, and now there's just it to offer, so let's save ourselves some money and drop ComSci completely from our course offerings. After all, computers are expensive, where can you find teachers willing to do it etc etc blah blah." I guess the states or the federal government (yeah, it's not a realistic view) might want to take on setting up a decent 9-12th grade ComSci course sequence to make sure that ComSci teaching doesn't completely collapse in the US.
the board realized that too many classes were being taught as "AP" CS classes and they really did not teach the students anything.
I say it's great that they're killing that particular AP exam. All throughout my university years, any time I ran into another student that claimed to have received a 4 or 5 on either the CS A or CS AB exams, they invariably were absolutely terrible at doing such basics as determining the big-O of a function, or how operator precedence works, or how to use compiler error messages to track down syntax errors. You can keep the courses, but the only point to the exam is to try to skip out of the intro course in college, which IMO is a bad idea; want to skip out of the intro course, do it the same way you skip out of intro language courses, or math courses... take a placement exam based on the actual course(s) final exam(s).
hah...ahahah!... BAHAHAHA
Next year im taking comp Sci AB, so im gona be one of the last people to take it. Considering theres 8 people in my Comp Sci A, and im usually helping the teacher with the code, and the other kids hardly care for the class. I think im gona be the only one in AB next year.
O.o
AP classes do not prepare you for university work (or at least earn you the equivalent university credit). I had a friend who got a 5 on a Calc 2 test and he still had to retake the college class. I took an AP Bio class, and I felt I wasn't prepared for the AP test, even though I got a B in the class.
If students are looking for challenging work, they should try taking their preferred course at a community college, or just do community service! There are several ways to woo a university.
Half the national merit scholars? The national merit scholarship website says that there are 15,000 finalists per year and about 8,200 awards given out. I don't see how a quarter of 200 or even 200 is close to half.
Best class I've ever taken. I took A last year, it wasn't very useful. Theory-based, all console Java (which is a marvelous language to learn as your first real language - VB doesn't count).
This class is ridiculous. Hash tables/maps, binary search trees/maps, heapsort, quicksort, Big-Oh, linked lists (and doubly-linked lists), stacks and queues
That's only in the AB class. Without this class, it is impossible to learn these concepts in a normal high school. That's the real thing - an APCS AB 5 actually means you understand important concepts in programing (no linked lists??) and an A class lets you get your feet wet.
I'd love to see their reasoning. This is the only computer course I've been challenged in (still working on removing an entry from a binary search tree - it's more complicated than it works) and it should be kept. We're far enough behind in technology without a decent standardized CS program in high-school.
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Wow... I took AP Computer Science A during my junior year of high school, and received a 5 out of 5 on the AP exam. I took AB during my senior year and received a 5 out of 5 again.
My undergraduate college failed to properly credit the college credit for the AB exam. After several hours going back and forth between the admissions office and the Computer Science department head, I finally got it resolved. Their explanation was that no student had ever come in with AB credit before.
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People really aren't interested in programming in the first case, and fewer and fewer companies really care to hire people who 'know computers' more than the very basic fundamentals. I don't believe we are in a 'programmer crisis, or that there is an 'I.T. worker shortage'. Its all just a big pile of steaming rubbish told by Bill Gates, because no one is interested in making him yet another billion dollars, while he pays them somewhere between scale and minimum wage. But its a common story. Why pay anyone in the first world to write software, when you can pay someone in the 3rd world two pennies on the dollar to do the job? Shipping software worldwide is much faster than any other kind of shipment, and no Kathy Lee Gifford problems happen with software. No one cares where it comes from, or what sweat shop made it. That the course is being dumped is no surprise, the only thing that made me raise my eyebrows is that its being done now. It should have been done 7 years ago.
i call b.s. a h.s. of 200 graduates 50/year. there are more than 100 national merit scholars per year. in fact http://www.nationalmerit.org/ says there are 55k/year.
Um. Half the National Merit scholars in the country? According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Merit, "about 8,200 receive Merit Scholarship awards" (yes, Wikipedia is a horrible source --- but that matches pretty closely my memory from earlier this year when I got my letter...). I don't see how your tiny school could produce 4,100 scholarship winners.
C++ does too in their standard libraries.
I would say that the C++ standard library containers are useful but not necessarily reasonable. There's problems with just putting any old object into them, in the way you can with a Java or a C# container.
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You can't read. He said half the National Merit scholars in the county . Notice the lack of an 'r'.
You would have loved my first job out of school. I got a degree in Computer Science and Engineering where I was able to study both hardware and software. When I graduated I worked for a company that built hardware and software for a lot of marine biologist research labs. I got to learn a lot about their work. Keep up your studies because the careers that will become available to you when you graduate are very very cool.
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My High-School offers no programming classes at all, so naturally no AP classes. I went to a local community college as a dual enrollment student to take programming classes. It all works out though, I'm majoring in computer science at Northeastern.
The high school produces about half the National Merit scholars in the county despite the fact it's a tiny school of some 200 students
Really? Over 10,000 scholarships are awarded each year from the National Merit Foundation. Your math may be a little off, or perhaps you meant something different?
The nice thing is that once you know how the basics work, your prof can say "Remember all those crazy methods you had to write to do simple stuff? Here are the libraries to do it in one line!"
It's almost like a programming language with "hard" and "easy" modes...
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There is a great need for something tangible to apply the skills you learn in all the math and science courses. What are the practical applications? Why should one simplify any equation? Why should I do anything "with respect to the y axis"? Sometimes it is helpful to see the actual results of this knowledge as it is applied to something practical and closer to the real world we live in. Computers provide enough raw "abstract material" to build things that are very much real and practical. There needs to be something at the top of the learning curve to justify the climb. Computer Science is the tangible result of all the academic study.
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Actually, I don't think it is a big loss. Don't get me wrong. I think it is great that high schools prepare students by learning them some computer skills. However, things I see is that freshmen, in a computer science course, lack the basic skills. They seem to have almost no skills when it comes to math, physics or even general problem solving skills. Heck most freshman can't even spell. (And when they spell something wrong it's not even done in a consistent way). Something else. It seems that students are taught things either wrong, out of context, or in the wrong context. That is really an obstacle, for the student AND a teacher in college. You won't believe how often the phrase "Well, than your computer science teacher in HS had it wrong" sentence is used in the first year in college. So if I would be asked, and actually that question was asked at the ACM SIGCSE meetings this spring, what it is students should be taught the answer would be: Math, geometry, how the solve 'logic' problems etc etc. I do think it is a good idea to teach HS students computer skills, focusing on that would help quite a bit. I don't mind that students are shown some simple programming 'things'. However you won't believe how many students do know how to wrongly create all kinds of code but are not able to copy a zip file from one drive to another and extract it in such a way that it results in an organized way of storing their lab and project work. The wrong 'programming' techniques we can usually fix but the lack of math, logic, geometry, science/physics etc is something that keeps haunting them all the way through college.
Does anyone here understand the "football varsity team" analogy? As a CS nerd, I'm afraid I don't get it, please explain :P
Both those mis-perceptions are easily dealt with by simply requiring the schools to divulge their teacher's class average AP score to both incoming students and admission counselors. If a student sees that the average AP score for last year's class was 2, it's a flag to the student that the teacher isn't up to snuff. Similarly, if a college admission's officer sees a student with a 4 in a class whose average is 2, that's a huge flag that the student is exceptional.
The AP test was intended to get around grade inflation. A school can offer loads of "AP Classes" but if the outcomes aren't verified by the tests, then it's an obvious indicator that the school is inflating what they're offering. Requiring a teacher to fill out reams of paper isn't going to improve the outcomes. Especially if she's a good teacher who is already too damn busy teaching and is pissed she's being required to justify her work when her average AP score is a 4.8. The number speaks for itself far better than any form could.
A typical year has somewhere around 20-30 National Merit scholars in our county (not country). The school, on average, produces 10-16. That's out of a class of 60. It's a very good school with very good teachers.
In 2001 I was a freshman in high school. I was in the only intro to CS class which had about 20 kids in it. We learned basic C++. I think over 1/2 the class got a C or worse. The NEXT level up CS class the following year there were about 7 people in my class. The next year they got rid of all CS classes, and this is from a pretty wealthy NJ town if that matters. It probably didn't help that the only CS teacher in the class was weird - reminded me of that guy from Silence of the Lambs. It puts the lotion on its skin...
Reports of CS AP's death have been greatly exaggerated.
Only the harder AB is being eliminated. The easy A (no pun intended) will remain.
When I took CS AP 21 years ago, there was only one CS AP test, and it had Pascal.
There were two Calculus tests, AB and BC. This CS change would be analogous to eliminating the harder Calculus BC, but keeping the AB.
It represents a dumbing down.