Reply to Why doesn't AP CS meet the tech requirement?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My kid goes to Einstein, college bound, and he's signed up for the basic tech class next year. Is the AP something he should be considering/doing instead? No one has mentioned this to him. Is the AP rigorous?
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AP CS Principles is not that rigorous. Many freshmen take it.[/quote]

Mine took it at Einstein as a sophomore, and found they liked it in spite of not really being a “computer person” at all, just a bit of Scratch work at summer camp in elementary school. They liked that it leaned heavily on logic and structure. The teacher was clear and straightforward, and there wasn’t a lot of homework.

The exam is done partly in class, partly on the official AP exam date in May. Toward the end of March, I think, they work in class to design a simple program that performs certain tasks using a preexisting dataset, although I don’t think they actually have to learn any complex code. It’s more to show they understand the logic of computing, how it uses subroutines and algorithms and such.

That’s submitted to the AP through the instructor, before the usual AP exam season. Then in May they take a relatively short multiple-choice exam.

It’s known for being a fairly easy AP, without a lot of cramming required. On the flip side, it rarely earns college credit for a computer science course. Maybe a general elective, at best. But it gets you an AP class on your transcript and is more interesting than the basic tech class, so possibly still worth it. And MCPS is now paying for students’ AP exams, so you’ve got nothing to lose, right?[/quote]

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