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College Board Kills AP Computer Science AB 322

Posted by Zonk from the unpopular-is-a-word-for-it dept.
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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College Board Kills AP Computer Science AB More

College Board Kills AP Computer Science AB

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  • You don't need advanced skills to flip burgers.

  • Without AB? (Score:3, Funny)

    by nebaz ( 453974 ) on Sunday April 06, 2008 @03:39PM (#22982216)
    How am I supposed to get 30 lives in Contra?

  • This is a shame (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vsage3 ( 718267 ) on Sunday April 06, 2008 @03:43PM (#22982252)
    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.

    • Re:This is a shame (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jorghis ( 1000092 ) on Sunday April 06, 2008 @03:49PM (#22982294)
      I keep hearing people say things like "course X used to be in C++ and now its in java and thats bad". What exactly is it that is so great about C++ for learning fundamentals that you dont get in java? The only thing I can think of is understanding pointers and how memory is laid out. But that really falls outside the scope of algorithms and data structures which is what intro level CS is really all about.

      • Re:This is a shame (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Wordplay ( 54438 ) <geo@snarksoft.com> on Sunday April 06, 2008 @03:57PM (#22982348)
        Part of the problem is that with Java, you have to learn class/object semantics up front in order to be at all useful. This clouds the lessons of the fundamentals in ways that simple structured language semantics do not.

        Another part is that Java already has reasonable solutions in the standard libraries for any fundamental structure. This makes all work purely academic. This isn't necessarily a big deal, but can affect motivation.

        Also, understanding pointers and how memory is laid out is a pretty fundamental thing, wouldn't you say? If we lose that, then any mid- or low-level language becomes esoteric.

        I think it makes much more sense to teach starting at the mid-level (C, C++-without-classes, perhaps even a modern flavor of Basic or Pascal) then radiate outwards to both low-level (ASM) programming and higher-level (C#, Java, Delphi, etc.) languages, as well as to non-C-likes (LISP, Haskell, etc.).

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by mawillia ( 1268578 )
          Actually,

          Our AP CS class back in the 80's had nothing but 3 commodore pets and one MicroVax running some flavor of Unix (thank god!) tied to 12 VT-100s. We were living high on the hog.

          We spent the first 6 months learning first to hand assemble code for the Pets and program it using their built in screen based memory editor. We had to write simple multipliers/dividers, etc. It required learning about memory, registers, and basic ALU structures.

          Only after this point were we "graduated" to the MicroVa

          • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

            by GaryOlson ( 737642 )
            Our Agricultural Placement class back in the '80s had two Border Collie pets running around some flavor of sheep (thank God!). Our wagon was tied to 12 draft horses; and we were living with the hogs. We spent the first six months learning how to assemble our ropes..... Now git out of my corn field, you young whippersnapper!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by RKBA ( 622932 )
          Bah humbug. All these high level languages like C++, Java, Assembly language, machine code, etc., are all just a waste of time. If you want kids to learn how real computers work, they should be learning a real language like Verilog!

        • Also, understanding pointers and how memory is laid out is a pretty fundamental thing, wouldn't you say?

          Exactly! Even in Java, if you don't understand the difference between duplicating an object vs. operating on a reference, your code could easily be really slow (because you're making 10,000 copies when you don't need to) or wrong (because you're overwriting data and don't realize it). Paying attention to memory is important!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rallion ( 711805 )
        Have you ever watched a group of people who started in Java try to allocate memory correctly? I have. It's not pleasant.

        You're right. Understanding basic memory management is not within the scope of algorithms and data structures -- it's a prerequisite for it. Imagine trying to write a linked list class -- a pretty basic type of data structure -- without fully understanding how to free up memory.
        • Well, you seem to be assuming that they'd be writing this linked-list class in C++. If so, I'd agree, if you take people who've only learned Java and tell them to implement a data structure in C++, the results won't be pretty, unless of course you teach them some of the fundamentals of C++-style memory management.

          Now, if they were making this list in Java, I don't really think they'd have much of a problem...

          I took AP CS AB the first year it switched to being taught in Java, my initial college CS course wa

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Duhavid ( 677874 )
            "Well, you seem to be assuming that they'd be writing this linked-list class in C++"

            They might and they might not. If they learn in Java, and things are cleaned up for the, they will not learn ( except on the job ) about how to do that clean up. If they end up in a C++ type environment, they will do poorly, at least for a while. If they learn in C++, they will learn to clean up, continuing in C++ will not be a difficulty, transitioning to Java will not be as traumatic as the other transition.
        • 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.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Duhavid ( 677874 )
            But it's always your problem, garbage collecting or not. I found that out the hard way with the first generation C# stuff. The garbage collection was not well refined, lets say. One service that I wrote in C#, all those years ago, would balloon up like nobodies business. Objects not referenced and all. Little I could do about it. Invoking the garbage collector "by hand" was not satisfactory.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mikael ( 484 )
        In my course, entry level CS consisted of Hardware Engineering (logic gates, communication with hardware (ports, memory maps), while Software Engineering consisted of data representation, sorting, hashing, file formats and input algorithms. How are you going to learn about things like linked lists, doubly linked lists, binary trees, binary file formats, if you don't understand how memory is organised and referenced?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Anpheus ( 908711 )
        How objects and methods and what-not work is just as important, perhaps more important for computer SCIENCE (as opposed to computer programming) than learning algorithms.

        With C++ they have the option of building classes the old way, with structs and manual management of all pointers, or they can start to work on classes, and templates of classes, and with Managed C++, awful as it looks, they can even toy with more general stuff as they implement garbage collection and other concepts.

        That path allows them to

    • Re:This is a shame (Score:5, Insightful)

      by plasticsquirrel ( 637166 ) on Sunday April 06, 2008 @04:26PM (#22982534)
      Java is an object-oriented language. In any real object-oriented language, you need to learn about objects right away. C++ is a hybrid language that is arguably one of the worst languages for beginners to learn, since it takes the ugly details of C, and adds on half-baked OO ideas that are simply optional.

      A language such as Scheme will teach better program design, and teach high school students good program design from the start. The problem with teaching programming in high school, and even at the university level, is that students are often taught convoluted language semantics (every detail in C++) rather than program design and logical reasoning. Scheme is simple to the point that it can be picked up in a day or two, and then the rest of the class could focus on real problem-solving. This is the MIT approach, with their intro course (6.001).
      • How times change. In 1968, MIT's introductory computer course taught FORTRAN. Much of the learning struggle involved batch processing and FORTRAN's peculiarities and strict format rules.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Eli Gottlieb ( 917758 )
        Actually, the MIT course has switched to Python.

        • Re:This is a shame (Score:4, Interesting)

          by mangastudent ( 718064 ) on Monday April 07, 2008 @07:42AM (#22987390)

          Actually, the MIT course has switched to Python.

          Except that most of what was in 6.001 will be taught in Java in the new 6.005, which for its type of material is Not Even Wrong.

          Even the AI course will be switched to Python. Very soon, the MIT EECS undergraduate curriculum will be entirely purged of Scheme/LISP, although due to some furious demand (especially outside of the department, since 6.001 is generally useful while the new introductory curriculum is strongly focused on both EE and CS) there is talk of a reduced, 3/4 size return of 6.001. Someday. Maybe.

          I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the MIT computer science program permanently. [xkcd.com]

          As a Chemistry major who was fortunate to take 6.001 about the last time Sussman gave it, I'm not sure what to think about the changes. Programming languages and the content of 6.001 are the only things that I find really interesting in CS, and I think it's hard to deny that we're in a Dark Age in this general area.

          And perhaps MIT is redefining what "CS" means in a good way, it's just not anything I'm very interested in, nor qualified to judge. Ableson and Sussman fully support the new curriculum BTW, and Hal has been heavily involved in the development of at least 6.01. Sussman has always believed introductory EE and CS should be taught together, and 6.01 and 6.02 most certainly do that.

          On the bright side, the new introductory course 6.01 (don't know if this is true about 6.02) is very instructor intensive, enough so that they are enlisting all interested upperclassmen to help in the labs and such, which I think is a very good thing; you don't tend to really learn your subject until you try to teach it.

          And with enrollment down so sharply, there are now likely enough professors and graduate students to support these new intense courses; MIT's historical practice of not allowing a fashionable department to get "too big" is once again validated (think of areo/astro in the '70s). The much lower enrollment is an opportunity to teach in a very different way, with more emphasis on building things, an MIT tradition from its founding.

          But it is safe to say that an MIT CS or CS focused degree (most students do the combined major that is heavy in both) will mean something very different in four years.

    • Well, I took it after the switch to Java, and the fish were still around. It's not an awful way to teach some of the fundamentals of how the inheritance hierarchy works, but it just looks so stupid. I've never really been a fan of Karel the robot either, so whatever...

      My school didn't even offer a computer science A class. I suppose you could've taken the normal (AB) class and then sat for the A exam, but I don't think I knew anyone who did that. At my college, a 4 or 5 on the AB exam gets you out of jus
    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Hemogoblin ( 982564 )
      I also wrote that exam in C++, and I must have written it at the same time as you because we also had that fish case study. Ironically, my teacher didn't tell us about the case study until a week before the exam. Instead of working on the case during the semester, I spent 99% of my time creating my own text adventure. Making my own game was great, because I kept having to learn things so I could add more functionality. I don't think I ever learned any subject quite as well; it's amazing how motivated you ca
    • It's my sincere hope the courses stay, despite the disappearance of the AP test. I look the A exam in it's final year as C++ as a Junior, and got a 5. Of course, being the A exam, it was not good for credit even at my state college. But the content they taught there carried well into Computer Science 251 (which, by then, was Java) course. It was easily the most informative course I took through all of High School. In fact, since then, learning Scheme was the only useful exercise I've do in generic computer
  • 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.

    • Really? (Score:3, Informative)

      by BSDevil ( 301159 )
      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

  • Bright side (Score:4, Interesting)

    by weston ( 16146 ) * <[gro.lartnecnnac] [ta] [dsnotsew]> on Sunday April 06, 2008 @03:44PM (#22982262) Homepage
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by samkass ( 174571 )
      I took is in 1990 and at the time it was probably the hardest test I'd ever taken. But I got a 5 and I think I learned quite a bit from it. But my HIgh School had already dropped it from their curriculum, so the group of us who wanted to do it got together and did it Independent Study. Of the original dozen folks, 4 were still in the class at the end. Two of us got 5's, and two got 1's. The High School decided that was evidence the independent study didn't work, and the next year's students didn't even
  • 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 h

  • Demographic reasons? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Goobergunch ( 876745 ) <martin@goobergunch. n e t> on Sunday April 06, 2008 @03:53PM (#22982332) Homepage Journal
    I found this in another article on the subject [edweek.org] and thought it deserved mentioning:

    Mr. Packer said the decision was made principally because of demographic considerations.

    Only a tiny fraction of the members of underrepresented minority groups who take AP exams take the tests in one of those four affected subject areas, he said.

    The College Board has made it a priority to reach such students, including those who are African- American and Hispanic.
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by thejuggler ( 610249 )
      Why not encourage more African-American and Hispanics to take more CS courses? Then these courses will meet their educational objectives.

      Instead, their response is to punish those that wish to learn so they can look like they are helping minorities.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by CSMatt ( 1175471 )

        Instead, their response is to punish those that wish to learn so they can look like they are helping minorities.
        Later in life they call this Affirmative Action.
    • I posted a similar response somewhere else in the comments, but this decision is pretty upsetting.

      This looks like a pretty thinly veiled attempt to "juke the stats" and save some money at the same time. They don't have to administer a few relatively unpopular exams, and they get to claim an improvement in demographic equality.

      This seems to be the direction of United States education as a whole. In the quest for "equality," the solution seems to be to just lower standards and opportunities across the board

  • I took AP CS A (Score:5, Informative)

    by JimboFBX ( 1097277 ) on Sunday April 06, 2008 @03:55PM (#22982340)
    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 took the AB exam when it was in C++ and somehow managed a 5, even though I swear I couldn't even read the code I was scrawling. My handwriting was terrible, and on top of that our class hadn't finished studying the material. Our class was a joke, and we spent most of our time playing games. During the exam, I had a headache from all the iteration I was trying to work through in my head, I'm pretty sure I misunderstood some of the questions. I really don't think I penned syntactically correct code at all.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Zarel ( 900479 )

        I took the AB exam when it was in C++ and somehow managed a 5, even though I swear I couldn't even read the code I was scrawling. My handwriting was terrible, and on top of that our class hadn't finished studying the material. Our class was a joke, and we spent most of our time playing games. During the exam, I had a headache from all the iteration I was trying to work through in my head, I'm pretty sure I misunderstood some of the questions. I really don't think I penned syntactically correct code at all. Maybe if the exam were graded in pseudo-code it would have been correct algorithmically. Perhaps the grader, seeing my handwriting and not wanting to slog through the mess, just gave me the benefit of the doubt and marked it 5.

        This, combined with your experience, points to maybe some serious irregularities with the College Board's grading system.

        Or maybe there are other explanations. Perhaps they gave me the wrong person's score. Sigh.

        I took the AB exam two years ago, when it was in Java, and got a 5, despite spending 45 minutes reading the fish thingy we were supposed to read ahead of time, and not having time to fill in in a bit more than half the answers (I don't like filling them in while I'm answering questions, so I just mark them, then go back and fill them in later).

        I think the grading system just varies a bit from year to year.

  • Very Disturbing (Score:2, Insightful)

    by twocows ( 1216842 )
    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

  • other subjects, too (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Sunday April 06, 2008 @03:59PM (#22982362) Homepage

    They also cut [edweek.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] 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.

    • Another reason to dislike my former school system, which grades on a scale where all the cutoffs are shifted 4 percentage points higher (94 and up is an A, etc.), and AP courses counted as a +.5. The other systems in the area all use the standard 90,80,70... scale and give 1.0 for "honors" or AP classes.

      The counselors and universities claim that they take these differences into account and scale the GPA accordingly, but I'm skeptical. That first impression of seeing the reported number counts for a lot, I

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tap ( 18562 )
        We got nothing for taking AP classes, so consider yourself lucky. And we didn't have any CS course at all, but I look the CS AB AP test anyway. Don't think I got any college for it, but it probably helped me get out of taking the intro CS courses there and going straight to the more advanced ones.
    • My sister took a few of those bullshit AP courses in high school(to get into Berkeley), then she had to take the same damn courses again at Berkeley. AP courses are just a fucking cash cow designed for grade inflation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tragek ( 772040 )
      Woah...... +1 to your GPA for getting a 5 in AP CS? That's bull. I didn't write AP CS but I wrote Math AB (and got a 5).... what a joke. It was no where near equivalent to a first year calculus course. No where near.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CSMatt ( 1175471 )
      Another problem is that, before you apply for your first AP course, you have to know ahead of time what colleges you want to apply and their policies on AP transfer if you don't want to get shafted later. In my high school the typical time one takes AP courses was junior year, and I consider that way too early to be narrowing down colleges. My university only transfers AP credits if you received a 4 or 5 on the AP exam, despite the College Board considering 3 to be the minimal passing grade. Even if you

    • Re:other subjects, too (Score:5, Insightful)

      by novakyu ( 636495 ) <novakyu@novakyu.net> on Sunday April 06, 2008 @06:20PM (#22983374) Homepage

      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.
      Don't worry—on many college applications, they will simply renormalize the GPA down to 4.0 (I think UC Berkeley's application tells you to ignore extra weight placed on AP classes and scale "5.0" down to 4.0, but I could be remembering wrong—it's been years since I had to fill out an application for college).

      Also, some colleges will do something that's ... even better—i.e. they tell the student to re-scale their entire GPA, if the maximum grade point achievable is higher than 4.0. That should nicely backfire on those asshat schools offering "4.3" grade point for A+ or 5.0 grade point for the B.S. (and S. doesn't stand for "Science") that is AP.

      Frankly, the best investment I made in high school was taking a few lower-division science classes in community colleges. If you are in California, they are likely to be transferable to U.C. campuses, and, by jolly, you learn a lot more there than in these supposed "college-level" classes. Oh, and did I mention, that for many counties in California, attending community college classes might be free for high school students, unlike these overpriced worthless tests?
    • Unless Berkeley is doing that +1 GPA internally, those bumps are usually specific to the school district. I'm a high school teacher who has taught in several districts around the state, and most districts I'm familiar with have abandoned the 4.0 system to discourage "gaming" the GPA and to encourage students to take more challenging courses.

      At least around here, even the lousiest districts and schools offer some form of +1 GPA modifier for advanced classes of some sort. I've also seen many college applica

    • Re:other subjects, too (Score:4, Informative)

      by gatzke ( 2977 ) on Sunday April 06, 2008 @07:53PM (#22983972) Homepage Journal
      AP exams are even worse than just limiting rural students. Students optimize their GPA by not taking non-AP courses. They won't take band because it is graded, but not honors. They won't take pre-engineering courses since they have not be honors certified. They take study hall instead. ???

      I just recently realized I would have finished a few places higher in my HS class if I had dropped band and jazz band... I was apparently not sophisticated enough to think about optimizing my GPA. I like to think I ended up with more scholarships than most of the rest of my class because I was well rounded :-)

  • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shados ( 741919 )
      According to the article, its some of the least popular programs around, part of why its getting cut. According to my girlfriend who passed the test with flying colors in a relatively large school, less than 10% of her class actually succeeded (anecdotal, but it could give a clue).

      As much as peopl eare more and more computer fluent, anything beyond using a word processor and MySpace is still voodoo to most.

    • Re:WTF? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Sunday April 06, 2008 @04:19PM (#22982472)
      ---(Totally off-topic, but is anybody else not totally thrilled with this redesign?)

      I do know that the buttons were changed when I responded to an admin. He, for some reason, didnt like my signature ;)

  • Other Courses were also cut. (Score:3, Informative)

    by richg74 ( 650636 ) on Sunday April 06, 2008 @04:02PM (#22982380) Homepage
    Although the Computer Science course is obviously the one that most Slashdot geeks will care about, the College Board also cut Italian, French Literature, and Latin Literature. The figures cited in TFA for these three indicate that there were fewer than 4000 students in each -- not very many for a country the size of the US. (Unfortunately, they didn't give numbers for the CS course.) So I don't think anything insidious is going on -- they're just trying to direct limited resources to the places they think the resources can be most effectively used.

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bersl2 ( 689221 )

      Latin Literature
      isti nothi...

      I took CS AB instead of Latin Literature my senior year. I actually kinda regret that, since being able to skip an intro CS course was hardly worth the foregone intellectual enrichment.

      I continue to see people piss all over the classics, and I am saddened and angered. Show some fucking respect for the civilizations which formed the basis for your own!
    • I see somewhere else that "demographic concerns" were the primary motivator, and that there were very few "minority" students taking the 4 removed exams.

      While this is all framed as part of the College Board's efforts to reach out to minorities, I'm not sure that simply removing the courses that fewer minorities take is any kind of real answer. Scratch that, I'm entirely sure that it's not. This just seems like an effort to skew the statistics to show more equality than really exists. Treating the symptom

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CSMatt ( 1175471 )
      If Gates starts funneling into AP CS, you can bet that we'll see more MS-centric stuff being taught.

  • Teams Without Trophies - or Competent Coaches (Score:4, Funny)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday April 06, 2008 @04:09PM (#22982410) Homepage Journal

    As one teacher put it: 'this is like telling the football coach next year is the last year you have a varsity team.'


    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.
  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CSMatt ( 1175471 )
      As of 2006, my high school has AP classes, but no AP CS. Hell, it wasn't until I saw this article that I even knew that there was an AP CS.
      • Competent AP CS teachers are hard to find. Most people who take the college level courses that teach that stuff don't go into teaching.

  • Better than AP? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by snkline ( 542610 ) on Sunday April 06, 2008 @05:01PM (#22982824)
    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)

  • AP Board is screwing up in more than one way (Score:5, Informative)

    by jmichaelg ( 148257 ) on Sunday April 06, 2008 @05:15PM (#22982928) Journal
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by sitarah ( 955787 )

      "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

  • 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

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