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Comp Sci AP
- Thread starter AFB
- Start date
See who teaches it, and ask around to see if the teacher is competent. Sure, if-else and while loops are a breeze, but if you're left to flounder on your own on something like a binary tree, you're likely to go insane. Or else you're a coding hotshot nerd. I'm taking the test soon, wish me luck.
PowerMacG5
Diamond Member
I took the AP Computer Science AB test when it was C++. Easiest test I ever took in my life.
AgaBoogaBoo
Lifer
Depends who the teacher is, ask CorporateRecreation, he's had the one I have now. I have a good teacher, but you can't really just slack off and get an A. The first year is more about learning concepts like OOP than anything else. Talk with people who've taken the class and don't go in with the atittude that it will be a blowoff class. Some of the people on these forums had a gym teacher or something, of course for them it's a blowoff, but like I said, it all depends on your teacher
nmcglennon
Golden Member
I thought it was pretty easy. I took the AB. Our school offered three courses and here was my experience(s):
CS I (A)- Mostly intro C++/Java programming. Output, Input, writing/reading files, functions, datatypes, etc. Also studied loops and made simple games.
CS II (B) - Mostly class, structureed OOP programming, contructors, destructors, dataypes, pointers, graphical libraries, etc. We also studied recusion heavily.
CS III - We had no cirriculum, so the teacher made us program Visual BASIC (a step backwards) until we game up with our own project - "reprogramming" Doom and "testing" it every day. She never caught on.
I did learn a lot in the course considering our teacher dressed like a fifty-year old porn star. I took the AP test and scored a 4, and then took a C++ programming class in college and busted out an A due to my prior knowledge.
I'd go for the AB course. It can suck at times, but try finding fun ways to learn CS... mainly by programming your own games.
CS I (A)- Mostly intro C++/Java programming. Output, Input, writing/reading files, functions, datatypes, etc. Also studied loops and made simple games.
CS II (B) - Mostly class, structureed OOP programming, contructors, destructors, dataypes, pointers, graphical libraries, etc. We also studied recusion heavily.
CS III - We had no cirriculum, so the teacher made us program Visual BASIC (a step backwards) until we game up with our own project - "reprogramming" Doom and "testing" it every day. She never caught on.
I did learn a lot in the course considering our teacher dressed like a fifty-year old porn star. I took the AP test and scored a 4, and then took a C++ programming class in college and busted out an A due to my prior knowledge.
I'd go for the AB course. It can suck at times, but try finding fun ways to learn CS... mainly by programming your own games.
AgaBoogaBoo
Lifer
Looing at your classes, I can now say it really depends on the teacher. As the first year student, A at my school, we've been drilled with the structured OOP stuff using constructors which you guys learned in the seond year. As for the other things, we probably won't do that till next year.
OP, you should find out about the comp sci teacher, won't hurt to even talk with him/her
nmcglennon
Golden Member
Same here. Do you go to the University of Texas at Austin?
Supermercado
Diamond Member
They teach Java here first. I did stuff in Java, C, Perl, and SPARC assembly before C++.
RaynorWolfcastle
Diamond Member
I always wonder why they teach useless assembler languages instead of a useful assembly language. We learned MIPS here, I thought it would have been better (if more complicated) to learn x86,or if they really wanted to stick to RISC PowerPCs are used in many embedded devices.
MIPS is the instruction set used by SPARC processors, right?
I had it the last year it was in C++. I think it's dumb they changed it to Java, but whatever. Java was the first course I learned at college, which I also disagree with. I think it depends on your teacher. I got screwed into a 3 because my teacher didn't mention that the AB test focused mainly on the things in the latter part of the semester that we mostly glazed over.
He said it was going to be essentially the A test with a few harder concepts thrown in. Wrong. It was ALL the material he told us not to concentrate too hardly on. Great, thanks. Even though it seems trivial now, I didn't know what the hell a binary tree was or any of that garbage. It should be an easy test if your teacher actually teaches the material that is supposed to be on the test.
-silver
He said it was going to be essentially the A test with a few harder concepts thrown in. Wrong. It was ALL the material he told us not to concentrate too hardly on. Great, thanks. Even though it seems trivial now, I didn't know what the hell a binary tree was or any of that garbage. It should be an easy test if your teacher actually teaches the material that is supposed to be on the test.
-silver
Usually, the point isn't to prepare you for a job doing assembly programming, rather it's to expose you to the basic workings of computers, give you an idea into what exactly your high level code actually does. For this, a risc cpu like mips makes sense, it's very easy to follow, and the entire instruction set can be covered during a semester long course. Once you understand the workings of a cpu, picking up another assembly language is much easier.
It's easy. I took it cause I planned on being a computer science major in college. I passed the AP test so I thought I'd get some college credit for it. Well, since I was a computer science major, the AP credits were for a lower-level course that wasn't within the scope of my major. So I basically wasted $60 (or whatever the current-day equivalent is) to take the AP test for nothing since I couldn't use the credits. Mine was the Pascal one way back then (1991 HS grad).
On a side note, the funny thing was my first 2 years of college everything was in Pascal. Then in my junior year they changed all the courses to C. The problem was, I never formally got to learn C, nor did anyone else in my classes. The intro classes which actually teach the language were for your Freshman/Sophomore years. By the junior year, you were in more advanced classes where you had to actually do big projects on your own. So we all got dumped these complex courses we had to program in C which none of us knew very well. So it was kind of a struggle. I'm glad they switched to C and all, but it was very poorly handled.
On a side note, the funny thing was my first 2 years of college everything was in Pascal. Then in my junior year they changed all the courses to C. The problem was, I never formally got to learn C, nor did anyone else in my classes. The intro classes which actually teach the language were for your Freshman/Sophomore years. By the junior year, you were in more advanced classes where you had to actually do big projects on your own. So we all got dumped these complex courses we had to program in C which none of us knew very well. So it was kind of a struggle. I'm glad they switched to C and all, but it was very poorly handled.
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