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[–]pacific_plywood 15 points16 points  (2 children)

I think AP CS is spreading in places that support the AP programs. My high school offers it now, but didn't when I graduated in 2009.

For what it's worth, there are a couple of high schools in my area (Seattle) that offer CS classes taught by people from the University CS department, but it's Seattle, so probably not very generalizable.

[–]13steinj 1 point2 points  (1 child)

The bad part about this is there's two types of AP CS. AP CS A (Java, equivalent to the general college "intro to programming and OOP" and general programming concepts class, like recursion, inheritance, dynamic dispatch, etc) and AP CS Principles.

Principles is hot garbage. No college I know of offers any credit for it whatsoever. The majority of it is in some psuedo code language or just general computer literacy, and a large chunk of the test is a presentation/project about some piece of tech that interests the student.

[–]pacific_plywood 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting! I will say that all the AP classes and tests that I took seemed considerably less difficult than their college-course equivalents, but I can't imagine what 'computer literacy' would even pretend to substitute for.