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AP CS Test Takers and Pass Rates Up, Half of Kids Don't Get Sparse Arrays At All

Posted by timothy on from the kids-these-days dept.

theodp writes: Each June, the College Board tweets out teasers of the fuller breakouts of its Advanced Placement (AP) test results, which aren't made available until the fall. So, here's a roundup of this year's AP Computer Science tweetstorm: 1. "Wow — massive gains in AP Computer Science participation (25% growth) AND scores this year; big increase in % of students earning 4s & 5s!" 2. "2015 AP Computer Science scores: 5: 24.4%; 4: 24.6%; 3: 15.3%; 2: 7.1%; 1: 28.6%." [3 or above is passing] 3."Count them: a whopping 66 AP Computer Science students out of 50,000 worldwide earned all 80 pts possible on this year's exam." 4. "Remember that AP exam standards are equated from year to year, so when scores go up, it's a direct indication of increased student mastery." 5. "Many AP Computer Science students did very well on Q1 (2D array processing–diverse array); >20% earned all 9/9 pts" [2015 AP CS A Free-Response Questions] 6. "The major gap in this year's AP Computer Sci classrooms seems to be array list processing; Q3 (sparse array): 47% of students got 0/9 pts."

5 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. What a confusing summary! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What a confusing summary. There are meaningless links that are just numbers. The quotes following the numbers have no context and make no sense. Formatting what appears to be a list into one single paragraph makes it awkward to decipher. The linked-to graph image is missing many labels. The lack of other details doesn't help, either. What the fuck is this submission even supposed to be about?!

    1. Re:What a confusing summary! by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The summary is summarizing a tweet. If releasing results like that in a tweet wasn't dumb enough, summarizing it is.

  2. Kids don't understand sparse arrays by Culture20 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Duh! I bet it matches up exactly with kids that don't understand pointers and linked lists. Wonder why that might be...

    1. Re:Kids don't understand sparse arrays by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No you don't but their is value in knowing how to write one when you use one.
      It usually means you know better than reinventing the wheel.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    2. Re:Kids don't understand sparse arrays by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1, Insightful

      "Working programmers" don't need degrees in computer science. They need diplomas or certificates in programming.

      Even so, it's not a bad idea to know something about the tools you're using. Perhaps knowing something about how those vertices are stored might help write efficient code for manipulating them?