Guest post by Harry Lewis:
Over the weekend I attended a meeting in Chicago about the future of the AP Computer Science test, along with about 70 other faculty and a few high school teachers.
The College Board announced last year that it was dropping the CS AB test after the spring 2009 administration (the more advanced version, with more on data structures and algorithms) for business reasons (only 4000 test takers). The A test isn't that popular either -- 18,000 I think. By way of comparison, 180,000 take Math, 80,000 take Physics B, and 75,000 take the Statistics exam, if I wrote down the numbers accurately.
The CS AB test is the only one for which Harvard gives credit for advanced standing purposes (and then only if you get a 5). I don't think it would be wise for a student who has taken only the CS A course to skip CS50. So as far as I can see, Harvard won't be offering credit for AP CS after this year.
The numbers of students studying AP CS are pretty bad. Only 12% of American high schools even offer a CS AP course (even the A).
There were rumors that some effort going on to line up industrial support to keep the exam alive. (The Italian-American community got their act together when the College Board cancelled the AP Italian exam, and managed to keep it going by pledging to pay the College Board, even though even fewer take it than the CS AB test.)
The economics of this are interesting. Most of the costs of administering the exams are in grading the free response (non-multiple-choice) questions. But a psychometrician gave an interesting presentation -- it seems that the FR questions contribute nothing to the validity or reliability of the test scores that was not already there in the answers to the multiple choice questions. (Which is not to say that teacher and student behavior might not change if they knew the exam were nothing but multiple choice questions. And the psychometrician cautioned that he hadn't calculated the nontrivial and perhaps different costs of developing the MC and FR questions themselves.) On the other hand, the College Board is probably basing its cancellation judgment on trend lines. CS seems not to be growing in high schools, AP or not. (Whereas Chinese and Japanese, also currently small tests, are.) (The College Board made the decision to drop the AB test and has no plan to reconsider it. It announced its decision without any consultation with the faculty groups involved in developing the exam, by the way.)
A great many people at this meeting don't like the A test, and after taking and grading a few questions, I can see why. It's a Java programming exam. Graders are trained not to take off for trivial syntax errors (confusing commas and semicolons in written answers). They do an incredibly good job developing grading rubrics and keeping the grading consistent between graders. But there are more questions about OO programming concepts than anything else, which doesn't seem right (on the exam we looked at, there were 18 questions on inheritances and whatnot, and 2 on "logic"). Several people said, "if you wonder why kids are turned off on CS in high schools, just look at the questions on the AP exam to see what image of the field is projected." Some proposed, half-seriously, that we ask the College Board to rename the existing course and exam "AP Computer Programming" (no dice, it has to be the name of an academic department in colleges and universities).
There is a movement afoot not to tweak the A exam, but to develop an entirely different kind of intro course to be the basis of the CS AP, something broader, emphasizing both the principles and the importance of the field. A couple of prior working groups drafted proposals. They are right on target IMHO, though maybe better goals for what our majors would understand at the end of 4 years than at the end of the first course. We spent Sunday discussing these. (The College Board is emphatic that there will be only one exam in CS, so this would substitute for the A exam, and we are not discussing a substitute for the AB exam in addition to keeping the A exam.)
These 2 proposals have no operational content at this point. The discussions we had were not premised on there being any programming, or on what programming language might be used (though there certainly seems to be a consensus that the first programming course should use a light-syntax language). And the discussants yesterday were divided on that question. So we are still in early stage development.
We didn't even talk about testing. The two boundary conditions are that the course has to be testable (though not necessarily multiple-choice testable), and has to draw people into the field (the NSF was represented by Jan Cuny, who was evangelical on the subject of drawing more people into the field, especially groups now underrepresented in the field, and has curricular development money to put where her mouth is). Obviously the easiest things to test are programming and math, so this is a nontrivial feasibility issue.
A critical question was whether colleges would give the imagined new AP course credit. I found that hard to answer. With no programming, or very little, it certainly couldn't place people into CS 51 or 61. It seems to be in the CS 1-QR48 space (though maybe not, if there is significant programming after all). Harvard doesn't give Advanced Standing credit for courses that no department would count toward their major, and you can't place out of your Gen Ed requirements on the basis of high school work anyway. In the end I decided there were too many ill-defined variables for me to claim that Harvard would give credit for this course, though I think it has huge potential.
This would take a minimum of 5 years to mature into textbooks, teacher training protocols, etc. Probably more.
There is, by the way, some worry that the College Board's decision will (a) lead to a general dumbing-down of high school CS, marginal as it now is, and (b) deprive us of a small but important part of the flow of new majors (though the number of students taking the AB test nationally is tiny, 40% of them become CS majors, and I'll bet a significant number of our CS majors are in that number).
It will be interesting to see how this develops and there will be opportunities to be involved in the development.
Harry
Harry
3 comments:
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. That is the book that taught me to love CS, and Scheme was the language I wrote that love in. The book had a life-altering effect on how I think about problem solving and programming.
It's a pity I can't actually expect it to happen.
If it's any consolation, the Calculus AP exam has about as much relation to math as a Java exam has to CS. (Speaking of which, it is AP Calculus and not AP Mathematics. What university has a calculus department?)
Those are both good points, but they take you in opposite directions. Should the course be one that introduces students to our field and will build enrollments in it, or one like AP Calc that certifies a particular competency valued by a variety of academic departments and relevant industries? You might get different answers to that question from the computer science professors than from the College Board, and that was part of my worry about the exercise, given the abrupt way the AB test was cancelled.
Anonymous wrote:
"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. That is the book that taught me to love CS, and Scheme was the language I wrote that love in. The book had a life-altering effect on how I think about problem solving and programming."
I teach AP CS in Palo Alto, CA. I start the class with SICP, and we start with the core AP stuff in December. I feel the same way you do about SICP, and since I can cover the AP material and a good chunk of SICP, that's what I do. Not all of the material is covered in my class--there is a large subset that is probably more than most of my students would be able to handle--but abstraction, data structures, and a variety of core CS concepts are.
I wish we could do a lot of SICP "train the trainer" sessions to make it widespread. The problems in that book remain the gold standard.
I have always thought that the point of the exercise was to get people excited about a field and to give them interesting ways of thinking so that they become better problem solvers. Not all of my students love SICP, but I do seem to get plenty of converts.
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