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Comment by applecrazy | Hacker News Reader

I've also worked with Java for quite a while and took the most recent AP Computer Science administration by self-studying the content. What frustrates me about the AP curriculum is that it is focused more on programming than the actual CS concepts behind it (data sctructures, algorithms). While the curriculum does cover sorting algorithms and their best and worst case efficiency, it refuses to use the standard big-O notation to do so.

Needless to say, the test was extremely unchallenging (and frankly, disappointing).

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Speaking as not a university level guy, I'd really be turned off of programming if there was more focus on CS concepts. I mean sure they came around, but I spent more time making working software, which is much more gratifying than implementing a map or linkedlist (which iirc we also had to do).

Ahh, and then you get to industry and you miss the simplicity of it all.

Although for reasons of sanity there should be a balance between the two, I think having too little focus on the fundamentals can produce very very poor programmers if it all goes pear shaped.

In my opinion, a software engineer (or programmer, whatever) should be able to understand (Within reason, so maybe just understand the purpose of) an algorithm and - given enough time - implement it exactly as specified with maintainable fit-for-purpose code.

Wow, I guess it has changed a lot since I took it in 2007ish. My recollection is that it was almost all theoretical, with only a little bit of tinkering with a toy game program as a practical bit.

There used to be two AP CS exams: the A and the AB variant. Around 2009, the AB variant was dropped, so the modern AP CS is A. I expect you probably took the AB exam.

In terms of rigor, the A exam is largely a "can you program" exam, while AB focused more on data structures and algorithms (although the most complex data structure is a binary search tree).

Well, it’s still theoretical-the multiple choice section has questions of the type “what will this code print out?”

Also, they have a free response section where you write code on paper (it’s 2018, come on, coding on paper?!?).

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