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Comment by amichail | Hacker News Reader

Was this a strong computer science class?

Maybe it's best if students see less badly taught computer science while in high school?

I took AP comp sci AB, and later TA'd the class. It was surprisingly good, covering lots of fundamental data structures and some mean pointer logic, and it probably changed the course of my life. It's disgusting to see it killed for the purposes of optimizing College Board Inc's race statistics. (Assuming this article is accurate.)

I took AP Comp Sci in high school back 2000. It was a great c++ class and really gave me headstart in the CS program when I went off to college. Of course I benefited by having a great teacher,

In actuality, my enjoyment of that class solidified my decision at the time to major in CS when I went to college.

Sad to see it go, I think it is a big mistake to cut it.

C++ isn't a good way to introduce people to CS. An introductory class should pick a language that doesn't get in the way so much.

AP Comp Sci isnt an introductory class.

I had two courses of introduction which were pre-reqs to take that my senior year. These courses were in BASIC. While not the best, they got the job done.

That is correct: AP Comp Sci is not an introductory class.

It is merely a standardized test, with an accompanying standardized curriculum. How schools decide to teach that curriculum is up to them.

For example, I had to take two semesters of Java before I could take the AP/IB CS class; however, my high school currently allows students to enter AP CS (material unique to International Baccalaureate pushed back to an independent study) straight from Honors Algebra II.

It's been in Java since about 2000.

But Java isn't exactly any better.

My youngest sister is taking the AP CS exam next month, and I was helping her study a few weeks ago. The first question she asked me (she's taken a semester and a half of AP CS at this point) was: what's the difference between an Array and an ArrayList?

To explain this, I had to go into: primitives, objects, and references; auto-boxing and un-boxing; generics; memory allocation and garbage collection; the different APIs (one uses length, another uses size)...

About 80% of her textbook was stuff like this. Details of the Java language that have very little to do with learning Computer Science. Only about 20% of her textbook as devoted to "algorithms".

I would say learning the ins and outs of a single language prepares you a lot better for general coding in the real world than learning algorithms does. In day to day work, I haven't ever coded up a linked list, but knowing whether Python passes dict's by reference or by copied value is pretty valuable. I had a fundamental understanding of that based on my previous knowledge of the same in Java.

I only think you should go deep after you learned concepts shallow and wide. It is important that students, very early on, be able to build interesting and meaningful things with their CS skills and experience the associated gratification.

For many people this is essential. My young cousin changed his mind about pursuing CS in college because his HS course work focused too much on tedious details. He was not able to perceive what high-level programs are capable of doing and the power programming as a medium of creative expression. Its a big shame.

Prepared to get replaced soon by a guy in India or southeast asia.

Unlikely. Really, is your job so (un)glamorous that you sit around coding the world's next great sorting algorithm?

The point is not to code the next great sorting algorithm the point is to know what sorting algorithm to use.

That sounds awful. It's a good thing this class is gone!

She's actually taking AP Computer Science A (as opposed to AB, which is the course getting axed). They're both taught in Java.

I'd much rather the course be taught in a language more amenable to teaching computer science (Python, perhaps?). But if it must be Java, better some CS education than none at all.

I feel old. My high school AP computer class used Pascal running on Apple IIe computers (I worked in C, E, assembly, and Rexx on my Amiga at home, though).

it was c++ until 2002-2003. 2003-2004 marked the beginning of java.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science

Shame... I remember pointers being the challenging part of the class.

Thats the problem with AP CS in Java. In our school CS 105 is the first programming class, it is C and you basically learn basic io/if/for/while/structs/pointers. If you take the AP class you skip CS 105 and therefore you jump into the next level class without having ever heard what a pointer was, looking for an ArrayList and wondering where the libraries. That next class is C++ and covers OOP and streams and templates and they get lost immediately. Worse, most of the kids in mine got 4 or 5s on the exam, and said they had never created a program from scratch before, since Java has so much boiler plate the teacher would give them a skeleton and they would have to fill in the methods, the whole idea of how to structure a program into functions was never taught to them. It sounded like it did more harm than good to me, I would rather see a high school CS class do some fun python robotics or graphics programming to get people interested and then when they hit college get into the details, don't let them skip the basics by taking a test that doesn't actually replace the amount of knowledge it says it does.

It was really good. I took it 6 years ago and even though I continued on to a non-CS degree, I still feel like I have a good grasp on basic CS topics (data structures, in particular).

This is a really terrible loss. I don't get it at all.

You're thinking of the BC test - the AB test doesn't cover data structures - just basic OOP (Java flavor) and the general gist of Big-O notation.

I think you're confusing CompSci with Calculus. CompSci just has A and AB--see the list of courses at http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/teacher....

It's a shame that they're discontinuing AB; it was actually pretty good when I took it.

I think I took the AB test. This was in 2002, and AB covered binary arithmetic, data structures, Big-O, and a bunch of other stuff. The CS A test (which is all that remains now) cut out almost all of the data structures, and was light on all the rest. It was designed to be a single semester course, where AB is a full-year course.

Did they switch to Java at that point or was it still C++?

I had some great memories in that class and definitely gave me the background I needed. Probably learned more in that class than in the early college Comp Sci classes.

Definitely a shame to lose it.

This was the last year of C++. It is entirely possible that the Java version of the class was less useful.

I agree with that, teach computer scientists mathematics while they are in high school, NOT CS. Have any other mathematicians out there had to review mathematically intense papers written by CS students. Frightening isn't it! How about we update the whole AP system and bring it into the 21st century.

AP Chinese or Japanese Literature courses are still being debated, but we were teaching Italian Lit?

I think we should start giving our brightest young men a larger dose of mathematics and Asia. They will work the rest out on their own if we give them good fundamentals.

Incidentally, the idea that Calculus is an AP course is indicative of the challenges facing education in the US. This course, and all of the math up to it, should be required to graduate high school. AP should expect more, at least differential equations, and I myself would be more comfortable if AP required Advanced Calculus, (Real Analysis).

Some people think I expect too much. To them I would say look at the numbers. China has more HONOR students than the US has STUDENTS, even when we include the drop outs. Keep in mind that includes only their TOP students, their 'B' students are excluded from that count, and a 'B' student in China would be an honor student here. The luxury of educational tracking as we have known it is one that is too expensive for us going forward. Time to raise the bar. It is going to be increasingly difficult to address this issue through immigration. Education is the only way out. All hands on deck. We should start to do what it takes to get this done.

The problem with teaching ODEs is that some people just are not motivated to learn that stuff. Why would a business man need to know differential equations?

I bet this country would be a lot better off teaching Econ 101 to every student graduating than teaching differential equations, or even Calculus. Who needs to know Calc? Math, Science, and Engineering majors. Some business and finance majors, but not all. That is not the majority of people in college must less the country. Yet everyone should understand the country's economy a bit better. I have always found a lot of smart people do not understand the actual demographics of the country because they only see the people around them, who are in fact also smart people. Realize that the country is largely made up of people who have never gotten closer to high math than what they see on the blackboards in movies like Good Will Hunting, and could care less.

Also consider most education majors never are required to get past Calc 1, who would teach it?

I'm all for offering it, I took Calc in high school and I know other engineers who took ODEs in high school, but requiring any more than Calc 1 in high school makes no sense to me.

> Incidentally, the idea that Calculus is an AP course is indicative of the challenges facing education in the US.

Most colleges offer H.S. Algebra II-level courses to incoming freshmen -- nevermind requiring high school students to take calculus to graduate.

> This course, and all of the math up to it, should be required to graduate high school.

My guess is that all we would be accomplishing is reducing the high school graduation rate. The only way it would be worthwhile to require calculus to graduate from high school is if we created a two-track high school system and started sending non-college-track kids to vocational school.

In any case, I would say that if we were going to revise the high school math curriculum, we should add a year of probability and statistics, not more calculus, especially (god forbid) differential equations. Possibly by shifting "Algebra I" into junior high school coursework, or by making Geometry an elective. I strongly suspect that the fundamentals of probability would be a lot more useful to most people than Euclidean geometry.

Having high school kids take DiffEqs would do more to make kids hate math than anything I can imagine.

I hate to be stickler, but bright young women take these courses, too.

What's wrong with immigration? Don't many excellent Asian students want to move to the US?

They still do, but current American immigration policy makes it more difficult for them to do so.

In addition, students from some countries are bound by their gov't to return since the gov't paid for their full ride, they have to go back and work for a couple of years. So sometimes, they don't end up staying here in the US.

Yes, but the issue is one of numbers. It would be challenging, in the extreme, to convince enough Indonesians to move to the US to close the numbers gap. In fact, the projections state that if EVERY Indonesian honor student moved here, and stayed, we would still be short. In short, how many techies can you convince to move to the US? Would that number be equal to the shortfall in students? And MOST importantly, do you bet your nation's future on the belief that all these things will happen?

I am a firm believer that the only sure way forward, is through education.

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