I wanted to get back to my post on the "hard" AP question. Specifically I wanted to reflect on what AP exams can and can't actually tell us and what purpose they serve, can serve, or should serve. First let's make sure we're on the same page about what the College Board is offering - they offer single end of semester high stakes exams. These exams provide a single number between 1 and 5 that, in theory, signify how well an exam taker knows the subject.

There was some discussion the other day resulting from some info released by the College Board on this past years APCS-A exam.The "hardest" question was the 2D Array free response. As it happened, 34% of test takers earned 0 out of 9 points on the question. What's interesting is that the College Board noted that at the same time, students did very well on the multiple choice 2D array questions.

Over on Facebook the semi-regular "is APCS-A going to Python" once again appeared. I'm not going to get into Python vs Java. Each language giveth and each language taketh away but it got me thinking about the history of language changes. I titled this "Language choices for APCS" not APCS-A because back in the day it was just APCS. At some point that split with APCS-A being similar to what we have today and APCS-A being that plus a CS2 (data structures) class.

Yesterday was, I think the fourth, To Code and Beyond conference hosted by Diane Levitt at Cornell Technion. I might blog about a few of the talks but for today let's start with one. In spite of my anti College Board bias, I really enjoyed Barbara Ericson's talk on APCS statistics. Barbara's been breaking down the APCS numbers for years - how many took the exam(s), how many passed them.