"Due to low numbers of students taking the exam, AP Computer Science AB was discontinued following the May 2009 exam administration."
Today's offering is, at best, some light familiarity with Java. That one is called "AP Computer Science A". There is even a wholly useless "AP Computer Science Principles" that involves writing small essays about non-technical aspects of computing.
While I am not excited about AP classes lowering standards, the Wikipedia entry makes it clear that it was discontinued because so few students were taking the exam. After reading the article, it appears that most of these organizations working with high school educators and their students arrived on the seen much more recently: Code.org started working with the College Board in 2015. What they are doing appears to be working: the number of students both taking and passing the test has risen. This strikes me as unequivocally positive.
In my experience, Java is not the friendliest environment. For someone with zero development background, I can easily imagine that the IDE and tools themselves are intimidating, let alone the language with all it's jargon and (in many cases) self-aggrandizing techno-speak. Perhaps the success of these programs will get more development classes into high school, but I think that even this level of success is significant.
I took 11 other APs, and felt it was comparably deep relative to the other tests. Generally I thought the AP classes were very effective as mature 101 introductions to the subject matter. Computer Science has a rough time because many students may reasonably be well beyond its expectations before even starting the course unlike one may expect for, say, Chemistry or Calculus. But I thought it was great for those who didn't already have the background.
System administration and working with the low levels of operation systems (not programming so much, things like bash, cmd, and all the low level stuff you can do before you get to programming) was something that actually took some skill. If I recall a of our operating systems came out of people who were more classified as system administrators.
Anyways my local school offered a associates in Unix Operating systems. The teacher was amazing, probably one of the best I had, but his class got canned for some shitty windows bullshit because the students complained so much about it being to hard. Yeah the class had rigor, but the problem really was 2 fold. Students did not want to really learn the stuff and mostly lacked a good foundation in computers at all. So they struggled on simple things like pipes and redirects.
I also remember they were pushing IT related classes very hard. You could not go anywhere on campus without some poster saying how much money you would make if you got a career in IT information systems! MIS stuff was also big too.
Fast forward, we flooded the market with IT people who had no passion, and simply where not really qualified to do the job at hand. Now IT is mostly a high paying job where it some how is acceptable to hire a contractor to do all the work for you. And when something goes wrong, it was the contractors fault.
Anyways now that I have been writing software for over 10 years and I see what candidates are capable of doing when giving them simple test on interviews (no not that white board non-since, mostly "hello world" in whatever language they want). I am fairly sure that the vast majority of the candidates would have not passed the C or C++ classes taught in my high school, or the ones in the local collage.
Schools are so fucked. Low turn out, low grades, and low number of people passing results in LOWERING the bar.
Get ready everybody for a fun wonder time where nobody knows how to do anything and it is always somebodies else's fault why they could not get the work done! The number one thing I get from peers when they fail to get the work done over the years has been 'well I have had no training on this', and 'nobody showed me how to do it', when showing them how to do it would basically mean doing it... And no this was not a once time event, things like every task would require you to "show them how to do it", result in meetings to talk about solutions.
Opps, turned into a rant. Anyways I am glad I missed the big switch over to java, not knowing C/C++ would have killed any chance of me getting where I have got.
I skipped the introductory CS course at my university, but the impression that I got from my friends that took it was that it was roughly as rigorous and technical as my AP experience was.
On the other hand, I know nothing about AP CS Principles.
So they have trick questions on the test?
A. Pass by value
B. Pass by reference
C. <correct answer> Well, the thing is...
I was a developer in various imperative/OO languages already before I took the AB course, and I still found it to be challenging.
I think for many that have never done any programming or CS, the A version course may still be decent. It does fall short under Big O, but there should also be some extra buffer time to do something else in the year outside the AP material. That depends on the quality of the instructor though.
Chemistry has just "Chemistry", good for two college semesters.
Physics has four classes! There isn't an "A" or "B" or "AB", but there is a "C"! You can choose "Physics C Mechanics" and "Physics C Electricity and Magnetism", each worth a college semester. (you can do both) Alternately you can choose "Physics 1" and "Physics 2", which are each worth a semester for non-science non-engineering majors.
Economics has both "Macroeconomics" and "Microeconomics". It's not "A" and "AB", nor is it "A" and "B".
My case was slightly unique though in that we had probably the best comp sci teacher you could expect in high school. He got through the entire A curriculum in half the time and spent the rest exploring more advanced topics/projects we were individually interested in.