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AP Computer Science Test Takers Up 8,000; Pass Rate Down 6.8%
theodp (442580) writes "Code.org reports that preliminary data on students who took the Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science Exam in 2014 show an increase of 8,276 students over 2013 and represent what the College Board called "the first real indication of progress in AP CS enrollment for women and underserved minorities in years." Girls made up 20% of the 39,393 total test takers, compared to 18.7% of the 31,117 test takers in 2013. Black or African American students saw their share increase by 0.19%, from 3.56% to 3.75% (low, but good enough to crush Twitter). Code.org credits the increased enrollment to its celebrity-studded CS promo film starring Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg ("I even made a personal bet (reflected in my contractual commitment to Code.org donors) that our video could help improve the seemingly immovable diversity numbers in computer science," Code.org founder Hadi Partovi notes). However, some of the increase is likely attributable to the other efforts of Code.org's donors. Microsoft ramped up its TEALS AP CS program in 2013-2014, and — more significantly — Google helped boost AP CS study not only through its CS4HS program, but also by funding the College Board's AP STEM Access program, which offered $5 million to schools and teachers to encourage minority and female students to enroll in AP STEM courses. This summer, explains the College Board, "All AP STEM teachers in the participating schools (not just the new AP STEM teachers), who increase diversity in their class, receive a [$100] DonorsChoose.org gift card for each student in the course who receives a 3, 4, or 5 on the AP Exam." The bad news for AP CS teachers anticipating Google "Excellence Funding" bounties (for increasing course enrollment and completion "by at least five underrepresented students") is that AP CS pass rates decreased to 60.8% in 2014 (from 67.6% in 2013), according to Total Registration. Using these figures and a back-of-the-envelope calculation, while enrollment saw a 26.6% increase over last year, the total number of students passing increased by 13.9%."
So they've found that encouraging students to take CS courses based on their skin color or genitals is less effective than encouraging students who have an interest or aptitude for the subject? Gee, I never would have guessed that result.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
/sarcasm "People graduate from college. News at 11."
This is what I see, big tech firms hedging against H1-b backlash.
How to get cheap tech labor at home? Increase supply.
How to do that? Get them in high school. That's how McDonald's gets their help.
Education - especially primary education - isn't about vocational training. It's about having an educated electorate. Sorry, training kids to be code monkeys isn't an education.
Science, history, writing, reading, and civics are what's important.
Civics is what we should bring back to schools. If we had decent civics training in high school, much of the BS that our leaders are pulling on us wouldn't happen.
And science. If we had decent science training, some of these con artists who bilk people out of their money to fight against evolution would have a smaller audience. And we wouldn't be wasting millions of tax payer money fighting people who want to "teach the controversy" (teach Creationism and other myths as science) in schools
Computer science should be treated like engineering: left for post secondary education.
That some school districts pay for the AP test but others do not.
Is it just me or does it seem like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates (for whatever reason) is trying to create a new class of minimum wage programmers?
So much focus on getting more and more people into the field, especially if they're a woman or brown.
What is the pass rate for women and blacks ? Or doesn't those numbers fit into your political correct world view ?
Why does every theodp submission gets stuffed with extraneous links, irrelevant asides, and his unwanted opinions? There is barely a summary of the actual story here.
Please ban theodp submissions in the future for being so piss poor. Thanks. This is an ontopic meta comment.
I love this bigotry and racism exposed by some of these diversity causes. Why the fuck are Asians excluded from underserved minority group? Because we actually worked harder and longer to be considered overserved according to these nitwits? We certainly were not privileged, but we did something about it . Now we are being punished for our success because somehow it upset some magical racial balance formula.
This is racism and it must be stopped now. There should be equality for all, it is as simple as that.
I googled for "ap computer science" and this came up
No Girls, Blacks, or Hispanics Take AP Computer Science Exam in Some States
Yeah, but how many male kindergarten teachers are in those districts, and how many boys in home ec?
Now excuse me, I'm a busy man. I'm off on a photo-shoot as the top payed model in the world.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
They are talking about placement exams - that's all.
And why not encourage some poor black kid to go into CS instead of the NBA or HipHop lottery? I've worked with those kids and pretty much all of them think basketball or music is their way out. What a fucking society we have! You know, human capital is just that, capital. throwing away some bright kid or not encouraging someone with brains is just lunacy.
My wife loved theater. She really wanted to be an actress.
She went into medical because she realized she needed a job.
Guess what?
Any practice she moves to, she is requested - she boosts medical practices business.
Does she "love" what she does? Nope. She does love some of her patients - especially her little old people.
She talks wistfully about being an actress and the theater, but she is a professional.
In other words, this "do only what you like for a living" is bullshit.
Being passionate about your work is bullshit started by people who wanted people dumb enough to waste their entire lives at work.
No one - EVER - on their death bad said, "Fuck! I wish I spent more time at work!"
Employers who demand people who are passionate about their work just want to work you to death - get more work out of you than they paid for with wages.
Passion? That's for family and your partner.
If you are in fact passionate about your work, then fine. But do not expect everyone to share that.
Many of us had to "sell out" in order to make a living. If you are going to discount me because I got into CS to get work, then support a law that states that everyone gets the same pay and if as an artist - my passion - I cannot work, I get paid by the tax dollars to spare you my non-passionate work.
Otherwise, I WILL get the job done, on time, and WAD - my passions are non of your business.
Diversity is good, diversity is great, diversity is our strength! We need more diversity because it's good to make everyone look the same with golden brown skin, and when everyone is the same, when white people are gone, racism will finally be killed! This needs to happen to fulfill the prophecy... er I mean it needs to happen because diversity is good, diversity is great, diversity is our strength!
Never mind that we chosen people won't race mix with you, or will be ruling over you with an iron fist. Er, did I just say this is front of the goyim? Oy vey!
Just focus on the diversity! Diversity is good! Diversity is our strength! DIVERSITY! DIVERSITY! DIEVERSITY! DIEVERSITY! DIEVERSITY!
Women are predominantly teachers, especially of kindergarten classes.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2011 Current Population Survey, men teachers make up only 18.3 percent of elementary and middle school teachers and 2.3 percent of preschool and kindergarten instructors—a dip from the 2007 prerecession proportions of 19.1 percent in grades 1 to 8 and 2.7 percent in preschool and kindergarten.
Apparently, this is okay, because more women means more equal according to feminism.
Where I went to school every student takes Home Ec.
I was kind of assuming that people knew all the cited examples were skewed in favor of women. I specifically put in models as an example to counter the argument that these are not highly paid positions. So since we're ruining the humor by explaining this, we might as well go all the way and cite Forbes for some model examples.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've taught kindergarten. The kids only flocked to me after we worked out the "you are delicious, if you misbehave I will cook you and make gravy" part of the relationship.
jobs vs. living in poverty without them. I guess I'm the odd man out here in applauding their efforts to increase enrollments of women and minorities. Many of them don't have the familial and social supports in place to succeed in college. They aren't encouraged to go in a lot of cases, or maybe have dependents to support and have no funds to increase their lot in life. So what if the AP CS pass rates decreased. Enrollment and subsequent total number of students passing increased. Good on them, achieving a higher status in life through hard work and a newly available opportunity.
You tell teachers they'll be paid if more people pass a test. So they encourage more of their students to take it. Many of those aren't ready, they're just hoping they'll pass for a payout. So the pass rate goes down, as the majority of additional takers weren't capable. Yup, statistics work.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
About this field... I thought that my affinity and ability for computers and programming at a young age was a gift and that I was special for it. I thought that since I understood something and was fascinated by it, that I would be highly sought after, well paid and appreciated. It's so disappointing to see how we've turned this whole thing into something that anyone can do. We've done so by bringing the quality down to the level that it can be achieved by anyone. The tools, methods and process that has become the programming industry has turned people like me into waste products. In fact, I'm worse than a lot of people at the job. Of course, if you gave us both some idea and said to go off and "create it" in our own way, I would singlehandedly crush any team (of any size) - as I'm sure a lot of others like me would too. The whole thing sucks. The fact that we're artificially modifying the base of workers in this field can only mean that it can be done by anyone - we've dumbed it down to that level. Oh, and thanks for also taking my gift and turning it into nothing so that I can be underpaid and struggle to live like an average shithead.
(First of all, to reply to the parent article, the test isn't for people graduating from college, it's for people in high school who will get to use the results to place out of courses in college. In my case that meant I could start more advanced calculus classes a year early, which was really useful, and got some extra credits for biology that didn't affect anything but probably looked good, and if I'd been at a college where tuition prices were by the course instead of the semester, it would have probably saved me some money.)
So it's nice that 39,000 students had enough high-level CS courses in high school that they were able to take the test, but that's a pretty small fraction of the number of kids entering college, even just in the STEM fields, and it's also limited to those high schools that had a good enough CS program to make it worth taking the test, so the statistics are probably not all that representative*.
(*And the fact that I misspelled "representative" in the title doesn't mean I'm bad at English; I ran out of characters in the title box. :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
... women and minorities. Many of them don't have the familial and social supports in place to succeed in college.
Seriously? Women don't have supports in place to succeed in college? I guess that explains why women are 33% more likely than men to earn college degrees .
I agree that's probably true for many minorities—but I've always felt that's more of a social problem. I think it would be a lot more helpful if these programs focused on poor neighborhoods than on specific races. For example, just because there are lots of chinese in tech, that doesn't mean that a chinese kid that grew up in a poor household in Oakland's chinatown isn't just as disadvantaged as a black or latino kid in another poor neighborhood. And it certainly doesn't mean he's less disadvantaged than a black or latino kid from an upper-middle-class neighborhood!
1) The stats are only considering the number of subpop test takers out of all test takers. It does not say anything about those taking the course itself, as the test is often optional, and it certainly says nothing about the relative popularity of CS with the subpop.
2) Smaller schools will never offer AP CS courses. Never. The data is incredibly noisy as a result, and entire states might have zero participation from a given subpop mostly as a result of limited availability.
For example, I could get the increase celebrated in this story just by pushing teachers to require all AP CS students take the test.
I grew in a society where ppl were supposed to be equal and education was the same for all kids. Most of them never became anything in life. Most ended up robbing or murdering people. Yes my neighborhood was crap. I in return was bright from the very beginning along with some others but then I speak about myself. Now I am pretty sure my chances were really reduced just to try to educate what can't be educated anyways and that for society I would have being better and would have provided a lot of development. I studied, I really broke my ass to get there. Two careers actually. Now problem turned out to be, I feel my brain was wasted by not receiving a better education, while a load of money was wasted into the plant that was not going to grow anyways. Sort like not putting enough water into a seed to put it into a stone expecting it to grow. When I see this things it makes my blood boil in anger as it is quite discriminating too. Selection is done based on skin color or gender. Very discriminating. Nothing, we came out from a discriminating society towards a discriminating society in the other way around. So basically we ended up being the same shit. Is like ohh yeah let's give a help to this poor black kids and this girls that had no chance. Fuck you. If you don't want to be discriminative all you have to do is simple. Not discriminate and that puts away skin color and gender. Yet more is discriminative with them as assumes they can't get it on their own ways.
... is figuring out how many students failed :D
39,393 tests total with 39.2% failure yields 15,442.056 people who didn't pass. The >.1 person there obviously represents a semi-sentient walkman.
Part of this issue is because the teachers are under qualified for teaching AP comp sci courses. I took AP comp sci in high school back in 2006 and failed it with flying colors (as did every single person in the course), but that's because they made us take the A and B exams but only prepared us for the A exam. Looking back on it, we should have been better prepared, but the teacher was learning the material as we went along, and he simply didn't hit data structures like trees (huge on the exam) or really much OOP.
Ap cs is a joke. It's a programming test you hand write. If the person misreads your handwriting or is just wrong about their understanding of the language you get it wrong. And nobody is there to prove otherwise. Oh yeah, the test is 120 bucks to have what is clearly a non professional grade it. How do I know this? Because I knew every answer on the test, finished early, then got a 3. I had to argue for credit the intro to cs course I'm college, then complained that the data structures class was too easy and too slow. I then proceeded to graduate with a 3.65 gpa and have programmed better than almost everyone I've encountered.
When AP has transparency in their grading I'll take them more seriously. Until then, they are a sham company enjoying their lucrative monopoly in the education testing market.
Isn't 67.6% to 60.8% a decrease of 10% (6.8 percentage points)?
For future reference, the abbreviation "AP Tests" would have been perfectly well understood (and is even trademarked!).
AP CS can be detrimental for students. You can come in as a freshman and be stuck with coursework that's intended more for sophomores. You don't want to do that. Let me be blunt about this. I've been a programmer from around age 12 (when I received my first paycheck) until now, age 39. The theory I learned in class is only very slightly useful to me, and I only need to have dim knowledge of it so I can refresh my memory if needed. I've never needed to quickly recall a single thing I learned in my engineering school classes. (*) On the other hand, I use the programming knowledge I picked up outside of my classes all the time.
My advice is don't put too much pressure on yourself at school by worrying about AP CS. It's not that important what you learn in class, and if you wind up putting too much pressure on yourself there will be no long term benefit whatsoever. Work on programming outside of class as much as possible. If your high school offers AP CS, take it. Just don't skip the class or classes the AP test places you out of.
(*) If you're interviewing at Google, they want to you to brush up on all of that essentially useless except in very limited circumstances knowledge. If you don't you blow the interview. I simply don't care about this useless crap, and I'm too good of a programmer to need to study for a programming interview. Maybe Google will one day start hiring the best programmers, and stop caring about useless theory.
AP scores fluctuate a lot from year to year as they change the test. 6.8% isn't all too big of a change, and that is too be expected when you add more people that may not be the cream of the crop. On another point, my high school doesn't offer AP Computer Science yet, mainly because there isn't a very big demand for it. I don't really understand why people are angry that women aren't taking the test as much. If I was to ask the girls in my school if they were to take it, a very large portion, much larger than the guys, would say no. Very few girls I know are interested in it. Not sexist, just the way people's interest are.
Write a full RTOS in C with support for logging and debugging in the course of 4 months. If you can do that you pass, other wise you fail and you aren't a programmer, you're a code hacker.
From the article:
"Because these underserved groups enrolled at a higher rate of growth than the average, their ratio relative to asian/white males also grew. Since last year, the ratio of females in AP Computer Science to males grew 8 percent (from 18% to 20%). The ratio of African American students to grew 8 percent (from 3.7% to 4%). The ratio of Hispanic students grew 10 percent (from 8% to 9%)."
So... 18.7% to 20% becomes 18% to 20%; 3.56% to 3.75% becomes 3.7% to 4%; and 7.88% to 8.43% becomes 8% to 9%.
But 2% (really 1.3%), 0.3% (really 0.2%), and 1% (really 0.6%) aren't sexy enough (and don't fit with our 'pat ourselves on the back' mentality); so...
18% to 20% becomes an 8% increase over 18%, 3.7% to 4% becomes an 8% increase over 3.7%, and 8% to 9% becomes a 10% increase over 8%.
Now look at the info-graphics...
First, the 'Fastest Growing AP Course' graph:
Steady participation from 2003 to 2011, then what appears to be a steady climb from 2011 to 2014.
Since the Code.org video launch was in 2013, you might expect a large increase from 2013 to 2014 instead of the continuing trend.
So the Code.org effect was a continuation of the same trend seen in the previous 3 years?
Second, the 'Growth in Participation by Underrepresented Groups' graph:
Another 'pat ourselves on the back' piece that show the *number* of participants in underrepresented groups grew by roughly 35% across the board.
Female participation up 35% (yea!), but the male/female ratio still around 80/20 (as it's been since 2010).
Black/African American participation up 35% (yea!), but the ratios over the last several years: 4.2%, 4.0%, 3.9%, 3.5%, and 3.7%.
Hispanic participation up 35% (yea!), and the rations of the last several years: 7.4%, 8.0%, 7.5%, 7.9%, and 8.4%.
The ratios seem to show stagnation, a somewhat steady decrease, and a somewhat steady increase.
Translate to: just as underrepresented, even more underrepresented, slightly less underrepresented.
This amazingly short 'article' seems to be the thing a project manager would put together to try to keep their project from being cut.
We go from 'if you make a video, they will come' to 'everything still appears to be status quo.'
But heck, if it puts more workers into the job pool we've shifted the supply/demand curve - MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!
Whats the difference between a pizza and a jew? The pizza doesn't scream when you put it in the oven!
You're going to Hell in a hand basket. But maybe Lucifer and the Israelis will laugh on their way to Hell as well.
these classes are not equivalent to a college class and have been debunked often. You want to show you know how to program on your college application? LIst the apps you have created for Android/iOS. List your involvement in open source projects.
Any student considering AP (anything) would do better to take a summer class at the local community (or better) college. Calc, physics, etc... Get an A and you can probably a) transfer the credit and b) do better in the next class
I read that as:
Eeesh. NSFL.
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