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Despite Push From Tech Giants, AP CS Exam Counts Don't Budge Much In Most States
theodp (442580) writes "Well, the College Board has posted the 2014 AP Computer Science Test scores. So, before the press rushes out another set of Not-One-Girl-In-Wyoming-Took-an-AP-CS-Exam stories, let's point out that no Wyoming students of either gender took an AP CS exam again in 2014 (.xlsx). At the overall level, the final numbers have changed somewhat (back-of-the-Excel-envelope calculations, no warranty expressed or implied!), but tell pretty much the same story as the preliminary figures — the number of overall AP CS test takers increased, while pass rates decreased despite efforts to cherry pick students with a high likelihood of success. What is kind of surprising is how little the test numbers budged for most states — only 8 states managed to add more than 100 girls to the AP CS test taker rolls — despite the PR push by the tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and, Facebook. Also worth noting are some big percentage decreases at the top end of the score segments (5 and 4), and still-way-too-wide gaps that exist between the score distributions of the College Board's various ethnic segments (more back of the envelope calcs). If there's a Data Scientist in the house, AP CS exam figures grabbed from the College Board's Excel 2013 and 2014 worksheets can be found here (Google Sheets) together with the (unwalkedthrough) VBA code that was used to collect it. Post your insight (and code/data fixes) in the comments!"
I teach AP Computer Science. I definitely think it's worth the time if you can fit it into your schedule. That's the main issue at my school. I constantly hear from students that they are told by admissions people (and yes, admissions people from engineering schools) that the school would rather see a fourth year of Spanish than a year of computer science. The students just can't fit it all in (and I don't want them stressing themselves out to do it). One of the best things about AP Computer Science is that you get some good experience with recursion, inheritance, interfaces, class design --- more advanced topics that you might not encounter as a self-educated programmer (and many of the students in my classes are extensively self-educated). For students majoring in engineering / natural science fields other than computer science or computer engineering, it's definitely equivalent to the first-level undergraduate course. For a student majoring in CS / CompE / EE, I would suggest re-taking the introductory course. One of the things I got out of my introductory CS course at college (my background is EE / math) was familiarization with Unix. It's also easier transitioning into the advanced courses like data structures (especially if the language used is C++ instead of Java, which AP CS uses). I took five AP classes in high school (including the AP CS AB exam in Pascal and Calculus AB). I retook CS and Calc even though I passed the exams (and not because I didn't get useful credit for passing those exams, but because I thought it was unwise to skip them).