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The Whole Story Behind Low AP CS Exam Stats
theodp writes "At first glance, the headline in The Salt Lake Tribune — Very Few Utah Girls, Minorities Take Computer Science AP Tests — appears to be pretty alarming. As does the headline No Girls, Blacks, or Hispanics Take AP Computer Science Exam in Some States over at Education Week. Not One Girl Took The AP Computer Science Test In Some States warns a Business Insider headline. And so on and so on and so on. So how could one quibble with tech-giant backed Code.org's decision to pay teachers a $250 "Female Student Bonus", or Google's declaration that 'the ultimate goal of CS First is to provide proven teaching materials, screencasts, and curricula for after-school programs that will ignite the interest and confidence of underrepresented minorities and girls in CS,' right? But the thing is, CollegeBoard AP CS exam records indicate that no Wyoming students at all took an AP CS exam (xls) in 2013, and only a total of 103 Utah students (xls) had reported scores. Let's not forget about the girls and underrepresented minorities, but since AP CS Exam Stats are being spun as a measure of CS education participation (pdf) and equity, let's not forget that pretty much everyone has been underrepresented if we look at the big AP CS picture. If only 29,555 AP CS scores were reported (xls) in 2013 for a HS population of about 16 million students, shouldn't the goal at this stage of the game really be CS education for all?"
Newspaper editors for writing catchy headlines,
researchers for writing research that both asks hard questions and lands funding, or
voters for permitting the government to underwrite such research in the first place?
I say blame the voters, who (a) are getting away with way too much these days, and (b) are unlikely to hit back.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Why is it alarming? People are different, genders are different. What's alarming is that every single job has to be 50-50% by law it seems. Oh except low-paying grunt jobs then it's OK that only men apply there.
How recent is the CS AP exam? I couldn't take CS classes at my high school - I graduated in '98 and high school level comp sci wasn't even a thing yet except at specialty schools. So, the exam itself is probably less than 15 years old - I suspect it's much newer than that.
AP exams also cost money to take, and they're only worth it if the college you're planning to attend accepts it in exchange for credit. How many colleges accept a passing AP exam score to opt out of Comp Sci 101?
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
decision to pay teachers a $250 "Female Student Bonus", or Google's declaration that 'the ultimate goal of CS First is to provide proven teaching materials, screencasts, and curricula for after-school programs that will ignite the interest and confidence of underrepresented minorities and girls in CS
This sounds like communism. I know what I am talking about because I experienced it.
Almost no colleges offer credit for taking AP tests regardless of score so high schoolers have absolutely no reason whatsoever to take those tests. You can either study for just your real final exams that actually go into your grades or you can add in an even harder test that benefits you in no way. Hmm, tough one. Oh and they typically charge money to take the tests as well.
I can't believe that this even made it to the front page. /. has totally jumped the shark. I mean, really, who gives a fuck?
And how many of those were taught by instructors that were considered capable by potential students.
Math, physics, biology, and chemistry are the traditional STEM subjects covered in high school. The field of computer programming changes rapidly, even though principles taught by college CS courses (which assume a level of intellectual maturity that most high schoolers don't have) don't. A high school curriculum in programming would probably be obsolete in a few years, so that probably discourages schools from offering courses.
There might be less here than meets the eye.
In other news, very very very very very few girls take shop class.
Why the sex disparity?
What are shop teachers doing to discourage girls?
We are going to have a HUGE problem in the future with a shortage of women in the trades!
Because the way things are going, the trades will be paying a lot better than programming and if Silicone Valley has their way, it'll be a minimum wage job.
I took AP Computer Science AB exam in either 1995 or 1996. It was given in PASCAL. Though I did very well on it, by the time I was Freshman in college (in 1998), all it qualified me to do was take a 1-credit "C for PASCAL programmers" course. According to Wikipedia, some version of the AP CS exam has been given since 1984.
Most colleges I'm aware of offer credit for 5s on AP exams in most subjects. Stanford gives credit for AP CS, but MIT does not. It looks like most of the state schools in my state offer credit for this exam. Maybe this is a regional thing?
"World to End; Women, Minorities Hardest Hit"
This is an Advanced Placement exam, so we expect few people will take it. You only take this exam if:
- You are going into the field
- You went to a school that taught the advanced stuff
- You have an interest in that as a major
- You think you will pass it
- Your intended college will give you something for it
So when very few students take it, that isn't a big problem. I bet the next headline on this topic will be in a few years from now, when some organization has 50% of the population taking the exam and they want to either lower the passing criteria because so few students pass it, or change the test because everyone teaches to the test and colleges stop accepting it because it is a useless measure.
You mostly increase participation in this test by making sure that those students who meet the above criteria are aware of it. I know people who may have passed it, but never knew it was available or were intimidated by it, etc.
Almost no colleges offer credit for taking AP tests regardless of score so high schoolers have absolutely no reason whatsoever to take those tests.
That's not remotely true. Each college has their own policies on if/how they accept AP classes for college credit but many do give credit for AP courses. I coach about 20 high school students in a sport and about 2/3rds of them take at least some AP courses. (smart group of kids, average GPA is around 3.6) Quite a few colleges accept them if your score is high enough. Furthermore AP classes can be beneficial in getting certain scholarships even if they aren't accepted for credit.
Oh and they typically charge money to take the tests as well.
Many states and municipalities subsidize the cost of taking these exams. Even unsubsidized, the cost of the exams in 2013 was $89 which is hardly prohibitive for a lot of students. Nearly half a million students took the AP English exam in 2013.
Well, hey, I'm a white midget.
I want to play professional basketball.
And I want to be a fashion designer.
There aren't enough white male midget fashion designers.
Where's my scholarships?
That's the point. They don't care about "non-minority" males. PERIOD. Their only concern are the aforementioned "minority" groups.
The interesting thing is that in a field largely created by white males, the "new" white male beneficiaries of all who came before them now want to declare ownership of the field and decide who should and shouldn't have access to its rewards. Pretty grotesque, don'tcha think?
I have an electrical engineering degree; when my two nieces wanted to go into engineering in college, I warned them off of electrical engineering and computer science because it has appeared to me that both of those careers are moving overseas as fast as they possibly can, and jobs in the US will be few and far between. They both chose mechanical engineering, and both now have masters degrees and have had absolutely no problem whatsoever finding a job. My nephew, on the other hand, did get a doctorate in computer science and he is now in Europe working since he couldn't find anything suitable in the US.
...that one day immutable characteristics unrelated to the quality of our code will be a critical measure in society's measure of the enterprise that required said code.
shouldn't the goal at this stage of the game really be CS education for all?
If you really mean Computer Science rather than general IT skills or computer literacy then no. True some subject should give a taster of what computer science involves, but most people need to understand computer science to do what they do with computers as much as they need to understand automotive mechanics to drive or fluid dynamics to run their washing machine.
I took the AP Computer Science exam in 1986. The class was very popular in my high school, but there wasn't room for a lot of students, so the class was offered during zero-hour, before most classes started. That meant to be in the class, you had to show up an hour early for school.
And interestingly, this was at Boise High School, and Idaho is one of the states cited in the original article. Apparently there were still only 50 students taking the exam last year. We had a third of that number back in 1986 from just my school, though I suspect we were the only school in the state to offer the class.
AP CS stats spin in Sunday's LA Times by a member of Code.org's Advisory Board: 'Unfortunately, only a narrow band of students - predominantly white and Asian males - is developing the necessary skills to step into these high-paying jobs in computer science. Latinos, African Americans and girls of all ethnic backgrounds are being left behind. In 2013, 29,555 students took the Advanced Placement computer science exam, but only 18% were female, 4% African American and 3% Mexican American...A great majority of today's computer scientists started down their career paths because of "preparatory privilege."'
Don't they realise that the IT industry runs on coffee!
that could cause a shortage of supplicants? let them use POT (Personal Open Terminal) & explore the information culture without cookies & being milked?
Not everybody needs to be able to write programs, let alone develop algorithms. You're just creating a lot of people who have a disdain for CS and IT. The untalented people who end up doing it anyway because of the sunk investment of time and money will do more harm than good. If you don't find enough programmers, then lower your entry requirements and train them yourself, instead of hoping that someone else will create "specialists in everything" that you can hire for a pittance.
I went to a large, fairly rural high school in a not-particularly-poor area. We had AP U.S. history and AP English. That's it.
Many of you (especially those of you who read and write the New York Times) come from adequately-funded suburban schools, and while you've watched The Wire and think you know what urban schools are like, you have no idea how weak the educational programs at rural high schools are.
I know, let's recruit some jihadists to teach us how to force everyone to swear allegiance to the great "bog CS"... even those who don't want to study CS. Freedom of choice? Bah!!! Let the beheadings and bombings begin.
Honestly, the "coders" that people want more of in this country don't need to be CS majors or AP CS takers. The world doesn't need very many people who understand CS at any deep level. Anyone of slightly above average intelligence can learn to write useful code in a pragmatic way and do at least as well as the average H1-B they're trying to replace, without anything more than a few months of pragmatic training on how to write software.
And for those small few (and it will always be a small few) who can (and want to) go on to be rock-star badass developers and/or heavy CS thinkers advancing the state of algorithms - they self-select and self-train anyways and will get there on their own, and any kind of formal education policy has very very little to do with how many of them we end up with.
In what way does the summary support the title?
The AP exam rate for this course might not be a very good metric at all for measuring how many kids are going to go into CSci for their undergrad. When I did my undergrad I found that the AP credits I qualified for generally were only applied if they were for courses outside my major. Hence if you had a qualifying AP CSci score but majored in CSci it didn't count, while if you were majoring in something else it did.
What my high school classmates and I did with this information, then, was use it to justify taking AP tests in our non-major courses so we could get out of some of the LibEd coursework that would otherwise fill up our undergrad schedules when we could otherwise be taking higher-level math and science courses.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
LOL.
No, really. It's like with math. If you are serious about either the CS or other science field you go and take those classes at a community college. The HS program is built around the low-common denominator. The rationalization to spend money on programs that will have a low ROI is not there. You are going to need a school district with a lot of kids and with a lot of kids interested in sciences in order to promote the better science programs. This is how you get the magnet schools where they pool all these like minded kids together as it's more effective, money wise, to have these programs in one location. Spreading them out over an entire school district would be costly and would ultimately be under utiltized. So, if you are really good at math and computer science, etc, the best option for everyone is to go to a commuity college and take those courses. Not only will you learn more, the equipment will probably be better, and, you can actually transfer these credits into a four-year program. I think a solution would be for a HS to focus on being a HS and for kids that have the talent refer them to a better equipped facility, at no additional cost to the parents.
In high school ('93-'97), I took every AP class I could (CS, English, Chemistry, History, etc). Each class had about 20 to 30 people in it, and I don't think a single one of us took the AP exam. AP wasn't so much about being able to take an exam to get college credit, but was more about being challenged. For me, I specifically did it to better prepare me for college. And honestly, it made college easier, and I did better overall than I would have otherwise.
Nerds are only openly hostile toward the world at large because it was openly hostile to us first.
I'm guessing you self identify as a "nerd". That's cool, I suppose I am one as well - I certainly was one in my youth. But I'm relatively old compared to most of the folks reading this so maybe I've gained a little insight. Hope it helps.
The world is NOT any more hostile to "nerds" than to anyone else. Almost everyone finds the world to be a harsh place because it is. But not because it is hostile but rather because it is indifferent. If you act hostile towards the world just because you perceive you are being treated unjustly then you are in all likelihood simply hurting yourself. Your value and how you will be treated is based on what you can do for other people. Hard to be of value to others if you are openly hostile towards them. You cannot control how the world treats you but you can control how you respond to it. Think of it this way, would you respond well to someone who thinks the world hates them and lashes out at everyone?
In reality a lot of "nerds" are pretty smart people who in the long run do rather well for themselves. Smarts in the adult world is a highly valued commodity. Develop some social skills to go along with those smarts and that's a recipe for success. Your value in the this world is based on what you can do for other people. Companies do not hire you because you are a nice guy or a hard worker. Women do not date you because of your high IQ. You have to bring more to be of value. You social status is based on what you can do for others and what assets you bring to the party. In school being smart mostly only benefits yourself. Among young people with undeveloped empathy and social skills, this can be a hard social situation at times but it doesn't mean "nerds" have it worse than anyone else. I assure you that it is no easier to be socially adept but academically challenged - different but no easier. Very few people have the whole package.
Unfortunately, we have become so mired in politically correct bullshit that it's now almost a crime to actually tell the truth about anything. A lack of women or minorities in a particular field is not a "problem" which needs to be fixed.
The US is well on its way to becoming majority Hispanic.
The geek may be well on the way to be as marginalized by a minority and aging white population as the GOP.
Tech is designed and built for markets. If you haven't a clue about what women want from tech, what Hispanics want from tech, you are not going to prosper in a 21st century economy,
failures in tech can be placed on the PHB's not the techs doing the work.
A lack of women or minorities in a particular field is not a "problem" which needs to be fixed.
You should not be so certain of that. The question is NOT should more women be in CS (or engineering in general) but rather why do not more women enter in the first place? The reason we care about the answer is because of the subtext question which is "are we getting the best possible people into the field?". It is reasonable to ask if we are unintentionally (or intentionally) driving talented women away from the field who might otherwise make valuable contributions.
Fact: People who want to study CS will enroll in CS classes. People, regardless of race or gender, who have no interest in CS, will not enroll in CS classes or take CS tests.
That is true but it isn't really the question being asked. The question is WHY does CS tend to skew so heavily male? I've got an engineering degree and the only field that seems to skew more heavily male is the catholic priesthood. I had many classes where less than 5% of the students were women. As a professional it is quite uncommon for me to run into female engineers. Unlike activities requiring raw physical strength, engineering does not obviously confer any physiological advantage to men so it seems reasonable to ask why so few women enter the field? No one has a definitive answer so far but that merely indicates that the question is a difficult one, probably with a multi-factorial answer. Perhaps the answer is uninteresting and things are fine the way they are but we don't know that unless we ask the question and search for the answer.
Why can't geeks just be geeks, as though they were Aboriginal, or something?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Let's explain carefully: AP classes are sold to high-school students as a way to get college credit. Well, you're going to pay for four years of college regardless of what you do in high school. The college will just pad out your schedule with more required courses. So by low participation rates, CS students are showing that they're wise to a scam to soak more money out of students and their families and not playing the game. Good on them!
When I was in HS , HS girl were most NOT interested into physic, math, and similar (like CS), but were overrepresented in the rest. That despite all the professors trying to make more girl goes into those domain (not a new phenomena). 20 years later it is more of the same. Maybe, just maybe, the average girl/women are not that interrested into pure abstract logic in average ? Just like the average man is not interrested (in average) in teaching young schooler ?
I did the AP for Calculus. Tested out but I knew exams were BS so I took Calculus in college. It could have been a different course. The difference was HUGE. The AP thing is a total scam and colleges should not accept it. We were ONLY taught to the AP test.
One single multiple guess exam is not going to measure the result of a college course understanding of a subject. It should be obvious, high school kids do not have the work requirements or motivation that colleges can easily demand. Sure, some do but that is not the norm; the situational and maturity differences make it impossible to expect the same from both. The AP students tend to be the best in the school but if it was handled like a college course the results would be different... more upset parents and failed children.
Keyword: children. The main thing college has which makes it better is that it is for adults. You are not a paying customer (despite trends to the contrary) you will be failed and lose your money. The customer is wrong until they can prove they are right. The filtering that produces elite graduates is what makes it valuable and once we've lost that (which is the trend,) it's just another high school. Big difference between producing functional citizens (public school) and producing valuable employees (primary motive for most college students.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Where's the push to get upper and middle class males to enter teaching?
Get it?
" . . .underrepresented minorities . ." ?!?!?!?!?! More democrat bigotry and racism!!! How were they underrepresented? They were not oppressed. They were not kept from participating. The "girls" in the article had just as much chance as the so called "minorities" or the non-minorities!!! We are sick and frustrated by this continual training by the democrat party that people are part of oppressed minority groups and must have special consideration!!! God made us all equal and that is stipulated in the founding documents of the United States! democrats, facists, socialists, communists, humanists, etc., all need to stop trying to promote oppression and racism!! democrats forget that they were the party that blocked the civil rights amendment so many years ago!
The goal can be both widespread CS education and increased participation by minorities and women. If you think about it, currently there are underrepresented groups so it makes sense to target remedies to that problem or else they will still persist even as you increase overall participation if those problems are somehow inherent in the current system,
I took a breast feeding class when we had my first child. I do not produce the milk in my family, however, and while there may be few ladies entering some technical fields in certain schools, I suspect that it's more to do with a BAD SCHOOL than with some barrier to women actually getting into a computer course.
Nobody tried to stop me from taking a course in breast feeding, though I didn't see a lot of dads in the class. Shocking.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Obvious Men's Rights Activist is obvious.
Sure, if there is a problem where people who want to take the CS AP exam and cannot, it should be addressed.
So start a campaign about it, its a great idea.
But when you position it AGAINST studies citing under-representation of minorities in a field that has long been hostile to them, especially women, you're trying to cover it up and become part of the problem.
So yes, please start a campaign to increase CS AP coverage, and please stop trying to marginalize / cover up another legitimate problem in the process. Both need addressing, it is not either / or.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
"shouldn't the goal at this stage of the game really be CS education for all?"
- shouldn't the goal at this stage of the game really be Art History education for all?
- shouldn't the goal at this stage of the game really be Macroeconomics education for all?
- shouldn't the goal at this stage of the game really be Diesel Mechanic education for all?"
-
-...
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Especially when the CollegeBoard/ETS/whatevertheyliketocallthemselves doesn't actually process dutifully administered exams with any shred of accuracy or decency. Case in point, when I took the AP CS exam a number of years ago, they flat out stated that I had no responses given for the entire half of the exam (actually the free response sections, mind you). So for all I care, they can all just go out of business/jail/gulag and nobody would care because they're all a bunch of bloody lying crooks!!!
At any rate, without their bloody ignorant system I competed a BS Computer Science degree, and I think it just goes to show that regardless of gender, race, or nationality, that as long as someone gets encouraged and supported to explore a subject that they're even remotely interested in, they will find some way or another to follow that skill towards something greater or towards a career.
I am reminded of this comic. Of course, that's just a joke. The trouble with people attempting sociology is that they have no idea what the rest of the world go through, but only focus on stories they want to see. For my part I never knew about people respecting what nerds learn before, "math sucks" and all that. But I didn't care. And now I care less for people who tell I need to change, or that math and CS should be taught to everyone. Because I'm certain they are not for everyone, but only for those who will learn even if you don't tell them to. Even the worst racist will find it hard to deny your merits in these fields, so any sufficiently smart kid would just disregard the politics.
I'm from Wyoming so I feel I have to defend it a bit. According to the data provided, roughly 0.0018471875 of high school students take the CS AP exam. There are roughly 25,792 high school students in Wyoming. I don't know how valid that data is, but it looks close enough to the truth. Assuming equal distribution from Freshman - Senior, that means there are roughly 6448 seniors. In reality, there are fewer seniors than that due to drop outs, people who move, etc. Statistically, then, up to 12 students should take the CS exam. 12 students is one class, which means Casper and/or Cheyenne are the only ones big enough to have that many interested in CS.
But it's not just a numbers problem. People in Wyoming just don't have a need for programmers, so it's hard to justify a curriculum that contains it to the school boards. There are a few small companies in Wyoming that do software, and mining/drilling companies have need of people who can program VBA in excel, but that's really all there is in Wyoming programming-wise.
I never heard of an AP CS class when I was in Wyoming(graduated high school in '07), but I would've taken it if it was offered. I literally took every electronics/programming related course that was offered. The problem, though, is that a class like AP CS would - at most - contain 5 students in any given year. My group of friends was the largest to go through the school with an interest in CS, which is where I'm getting the 5 from. We ended up creating a Computer Club, which was mainly attended by us and a few people who were curious from time to time and was quickly destroyed when we left with no one to carry the torch. I've stayed in touch with teachers over the years and at best they have 2-3 students that are interested in programming like we were.
However, it isn't surprising to see Utah with so many students. It doesn't look like a lot, but by using the same data source and calculations as Wyoming, you could expect up to 60 students to take the AP CS exam, and they're about double that. That makes sense to me, because Utah always has multiple teams in the top 10 for the rocky mountain region in the ACM's ICPC.
When there is a glut of STEM graduates anyway.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
as we're always told I think they'll have no problem making up their own mind about what they want to do without the media constantly telling them. And they'll be perfectly capable of doing it without any need for outside paternalistic advantage or encouragement.
You may be old enough that you aren't familiar with schools these days. I can assure you that for very many young "nerds", the world is actively and openly hostile towards intelligence, which makes it rather hard to develop those social skills
It's NOT about intelligence. It's about being different. I work directly with dozens of school children between the ages of 11 and 18 on a daily basis for about 4 months every year. Children will ostracize ANYONE who is different in any way but this is hardly limited to intelligence. Smart, dumb, awkward, foreign, racially different, accents, fat, skinny, small, large, it doesn't matter. If you are notably different then you will be harassed in some manner. Children do not have fully developed senses of empathy. Learning to deal with this is actually a valuable part of growing up. I run into overly sheltered children all the time who have NO idea how to deal with difficult situations. Painful as it may be sometimes, it is a part of social development.
But if you're trying to tell me that struggling with schoolwork is as emotionally painful as struggling socially, I absolutely disagree.
I am someone who at times has struggled with both schoolwork and social awkwardness. I am fairly smart and eventually attended some top universities but for various reasons I was a mediocre to poor student for most of my academic career, barely passing at times and was almost held back at least twice. I also was a shy and socially awkward kid with a funny name. YES, they both are crushing. It can be absolutely demoralizing to do poorly on schoolwork. Some people don't care just like some people don't care what others think but if you do care (and most do) it is devastating. You get told you will never amount to anything, that your future is hopeless, that you are trailing your peers and won't catch up, that teaching you is a waste of time. Worthless, hopeless, dumb, useless. I know because I've heard all that and none of it because of my social skills. If you think that isn't devastating to a young ego then you really don't get it. It doesn't just come from your peers, it comes from teachers and parents and adults who barely know you.
A socially adept bad student has, by definition, plenty of friends and support to fall back on, and his peers won't think any less of him for his poor education (until he graduates, at least)
I assure you that bad students get ridden every bit as hard if not worse than smart ones. I see it constantly. Even the ones with lots of friends get harassed by those very same "friends". The only reason they hang out is because the need for social inclusion is so strong that they will put up with being treated badly.
On the other hand, a nerd has few or no friends, and is openly derided and shunned by his peers.
Most people have few real friends. Nerds generally have their own social circles and in reality very few people fit the social pariah model you describe. It's more a question of degree.
Most people don't understand the situation there. Least populated state in the Nation. Lots of oil there, but it ain't no Texas. I grew up there and my HS didn't even offer the SAT. We were lucky to be given the opportunity to take the ACT at all. Funding is thin, as it is for most school systems, and I believe that is the prime motivator.
The country bumpkin factor is high, and hicks don't have much need for dem confounded computers and such, the tractor ain't gonna drive itself! (You just wait Mr. Bumpkin, that tech is out there already.)
Keeping the population in state is a challenge, and I'm sure the powers that be aren't keen on giving them tools to empower them to follow a CS path that automatically jumps them out of state. UW and LCCC (Laramie County Community College, widely known as Last Chance Country College) aren't well known for their tech programs.
Tweet, tweet, all id10t's out of the gene pool, open swim is over.
Last I checked, I'm a girl. I took AP Comp Sci in HS, but did NOT take the AP exam. Why? Because it was my planned degree in college, and I knew they wouldn't give me credits in my major, so why pay to take the test? Instead I took a Physics AP exam to cross off a few distribution of studies classes.
Not a lot of gals thought the way I did back in high school. Fact is they liked the english-y and touchy feely subjects more. Please don't press these women to go into a field they are NOT mentally equiped to do well in. Identify the ones that have the potential and encourage them to explore it, but don't put a bounty on their heads. I want the job because I do it well, not because of my genitalia or the color of my flesh.
-JM
'Racism' means (99% of the time) 'white people being nasty to non-whites who are in the whites' countries'...
How about the whites who actually want to live with non-whites (which would be about 5% of them) set up their OWN, wonderful 'multi-culti' country somewhere, and all the non-whites who seem to love living among whites more than their own kind (I can't imagine why...) go and live with them, then they will never experience 'racism' ever again, because they'll be living with white people who actually WANT to live with them.
What a crazy idea. Far too simple.
(Waits for screams of "Racist!" from moronic, sheeplike Slashtards...)
No, much better to just FORCE every white person on earth to live in a multi-racial, third world shithole, right? That's really 'democratic' and 'fair'...
After all, those damn white people are far too happy and successful, it's not FAIR to allow them to just LIVE WITH THEIR OWN KIND, is it...
Funny thing about "minorities"...
When a small percentage of the population has nothing particularly special to offer the rest of the population, we worry about them becoming marginalized and ignored, possibly even subject to prejudice.
The percentages aren't small and the trend lines are running strongly against an all white male geek elite. If he wants high paying high tech jobs to remain in the states, he has to come to terms with a changing population.
When a small percentage of the population has something that everyone wants, something that most people don't have the capacity to get for themselves, and especially something that others can't take by force - We call them "elites", not "minorities".
The Roads Must Roll
This is the technocratic argument that has always haunted the geek elite --- and Heinlein pinned it's pelt to the wall in 1940.
As an industrial civilization expands, its complexities multiply. With each new development the web of interlocking units becomes more tangled. Each small unit grows more important, more susceptible to shock, more liable to halt the entire organism with its own individual breakdown.
--- Introduction to the Modern Library edition.
When an elite becomes too arrogant, too powerful, its power is broken.
If we're requiring (or at least desiring) that X% of coders (or employees, or whatever) are of each ethnic group where X is representative of their proportionality in a given population, logically this means that there should be ceilings on participation as well, as the entire exercise is zero-sum.
Let's use gender as that's a relatively simple binary proposition (let's assume so, anyway). If 48.8% of the population is male, and 51.2% is female, then If we're saying that we'd "prefer" 51% of the coders be female, we ipso fact must ALSO conclude that we don't want MORE than 51% of the females to be coders, or this will mean that too few men are coders. (Unless, that is, you're a hypocrite who believes that only certain groups are "due" such protection; then you're not about fairness at all, but in honesty nothing more than a tendentious cheerleader picking a side.)
Of course, this gets far more complicated with ethnicity: if we recognize that 12.6% of Americans are African-American, and we are willing to bend our rules, admissions processes, hiring standards, etc to make sure that is represented in our employment figures, again, one must ABSOLUTELY fire any greater number of blacks in any job to ensure that native americans, asian americans (of every flavor, of course), latinos, inuit, etc all get fair representation.
-Styopa
How did this stay on; from an anonymous coward too? It's why we need the slider control returned to slashdot.
1) While perving teachers aren't new, if a schoolgirl even thinks rape, you are out of a job and in a lot of trouble.
2) I know sexuality is a major part of the female identity but we should be ignoring it as much as possible: Notice the communists made the women dress like men and communist governments had the first women in space, etc.
3) You're demanding women run around nearly naked and do advanced studies: This strengthens the feminist dogma that equality means women can do as they please and demand hand-outs from men.
This is asymmetric bullshit.
Where, for example, are all the calls for affirmative action to encourage more white men into nursing? (which is 91.4% filled by women, and health is a field that African Americans are more likely to work in than any other )?
I don't know if it matters, or if it's still like this, but the test is the dumbest test I've taken. I took a community course C++ class and did programming on the side. I didn't take AP Comp Sci. I then took the AP Comp Science test and did terrible. They used all these custom classes - nothing from the STL and nothing built into C++. The APString class? I mean seriously, why would you need a customer class for a string?
Dear me, you are a self-absorbed and pretentious fuck, aren't you. But, delusion, snark and incoherence don't support your assertions.
You have to understand High School and the AP process to understand this. Lots of kids take both Honors and AP classes, just not the Exam. There isn't much in it for them to take the Exam. They have to pass with about 70% and then it just gets them some college credit. It doesn't even mean that they don't have to take that class when the get to college, the colleges decide if the High School class is the same and if the AP credit lets them skip. I have a daughter in Engineering school, she didn't take any of the Math/Science courses as AP, but as Honors.
So, this really means nothing. They should look at the number of girls, minorities, etc. that take Math and Science courses in High School and College, not if they take the AP test.
Over educated over paid arrogant idiots. Not concerned about skin color or private organs. Never have cared about either, not starting any time soon.
Yes I have read it, most over-hyped pile of garbage ever.
Ender's Game was so bad whenever I see or hear Hugo or Nebula award, I look for something different.
I would say Obama was the biggest disappointment ever, but I read Ender's Game.
Seriously fuck that drivel.
wtf is this liberal rubbish... if girls and minorities don't like it, let them. if anyone, pay the people who don't need to incentive.
Pandering to minorities = more votes for Democrats.
Or the "designers" and "marketers" that have more sway over management that the peon engineers that have to make the crap "designs" work. I highly doubt you could get Raymond Chen on record as saying the Win8 start menu was a good idea.
I tutor students in programming for our Robotics club, which has annually attracted the best programmers in the school - even those who taught themselves instead of taking the school comp sci class. Not one student has ever been interested in taking the AP CS test primarily because the schools they were applying to would not offer college credit for it (one that did said they still strongly encouraged the students to take the course anyway). The uniform response from the schools was (1) AP only covers Java and all of those colleges want their students using C++ or C#, and (2) the AP test doesn't guarantee a solid background in all areas of CS so the school wants the kids going through their classes to be certain they have a solid grounding.
My son was one of those who opted not to take the test. He didn't have any desire to pay money to have some organization "verify" that he knew some level of programming. He had his achievements in re-writing our robot code base (which won an award for innovation last year) and writing his own games and android apps to show him that, as well as the $200 he received for writing a WordPress plugin for a small company.
My son did take the Calc tests and English and saved himself two classes that way. At private university prices, that was money well spent.
I've heard this opinion even from those who did get a CS degree and it shows a lack of understanding of what the degree provides (and a massive ego, in many cases). While it is pretty easy to learn to write code, it takes a lot of study to learn to write it well and avoid the pitfalls that are so common. You can see this very clearly with educational software and software for vertical markets. These apps are quite often not developed by anyone with formal CS education and it shows in the software that is poorly structured so it is hard to debug or modify, network and database interfaces that are unreliable or unnecessarily slow, limitations (esp. with web-based services) that are unnecessary because they relied on an equally poor development environment and libraries, and bugs that could be avoided with what you learn in a formal education.
If anything, this country needs a lot MORE CS majors (although not any more CS AP takers) so we can stop making such shoddy products and get rid of any pretense that there is a need to bring developers in from other countries.
Of course, not all of those need to go on for a Ph.D., which is where you learn to understand CS at any deep level and be a heavy CS thinker advancing the state of algorithms. A B.S. degree won't really do that for you.
I'm also concerned that the Salt Lake tribune uses all caps on a headline as if they're writing a title.
Pick up any major newspaper, I don't think you will see every significant word capitalized.
Arrgh!
Thank you for reading this.
ODF
If your only tool is a hammer, you'll approach every problem as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow