College Board Kills AP Computer Science AB

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.'"

Without AB?

How am I supposed to get 30 lives in Contra?

Re:

Cheat like everyone else.

Re:Without AB?

Also, without AB, I'd just be normal.

This is a shame

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

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

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:

I didn't take AP CS--it wasn't available to me in the 80s, when I was in high school. I'm just speaking CS education in general.

The same arguments apply for early undergrad courses, which have also moved towards Java in many schools (probably the real rea

Re:This is a shame

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).

Re:This is a shame

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.

Bright side

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.

Demographic reasons?

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.

I took AP CS A

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.

Re:I took AP CS A

I'd really like to know what her teaching method was given the combination of cheerleading and CS usually don't go together despite our daily wishes.
Push to the left!
Push to the right!
Pop up, push down
Byte, byte byte!

other subjects, too

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.

Re:other subjects, too

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?

Other Courses were also cut.

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:Other Courses were also cut.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/04/09/32ap.h27.html [edweek.org]

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.

It looks like there were plenty of students, just not enough of the right color.

Teams Without Trophies - or Competent Coaches

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.

Re:Teams Without Trophies - or Competent Coaches

Geeze, this is /. Is there anywhere a sports related metaphor is going to be less understood?

Re:Teams Without Trophies - or Competent Coaches

Interestingly, my AP Chemistry Teacher was the gym teacher subbing for the chem teacher who moved to a new school. We taught him grade 12 chemistry so he could teach the next year, while we taught ourselves AP Chem (I got a 4).

The previous semester, our Chem 12 class had pooled our money to hire a university professor for 3 hours 1 day a week, since that teacher was so bad.

AP Board is screwing up in more than one way

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.

Really?

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 mos

Re:WTF?

---(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 ;)

Re:

"Advanced Placement" or AP courses are advanced courses (supposedly college level) that are offered at some high schools. Unlike the rest of the local- and state-controlled curriculum, AP courses are administered by a national organization, the College Bo

Re:GOD CREATED ADAM AND EVE

Celibate humans cannot reproduce! Say NO to the ANTI SEX agenda!!!