Detailed data on AP CS pass rates, race, and gender for 2013 | Hacker News Reader

Detailed data on AP CS pass rates, race, and gender for 2013

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29 pointsmahmoudimus54 comments

I think this analysis is flawed. Let's dive into one statistic.

    8 states had no Hispanic students take the exam: Alaska, Idaho, Kansas,
    Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming.

Sounds pretty damning. These states are completely ignoring an entire demographic!

First, Wyoming should not be on the list. They had zero students take AP CS.

For the other states, here are the total number of students that took AP CS in 2013.

    Alaska       21
    Idaho        47
    Kansas       47
    Mississippi   1
    Montana      11
    Nebraska     46
    North Dakota  2

It's obvious that North Dakota and Mississippi should also have been left off the list as they had less than five students take the exam. We're now down to five states. Let's look at the Hispanic population size in these states[1]

    Alaska       6.1%
    Idaho        11.0%
    Kansas       11.0%
    Montana      3.1%
    Nebraska     9.7%

With these percentages, we can calculate the expected number of Hispanic students for each state.

    Alaska       1.28
    Idaho        5.17
    Kansas       5.17
    Montana      0.341
    Nebraska     4.462

So we can take take Montana and Alaska off the list. I could go further and get the actual demographic breakdown per city for each included high school, but I think the point is clear: AP CS enrollment for many states is too small to draw accurate conclusions.

The real question we should be asking: Why are so few schools offering AP CS?

[1] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html

> Why are so few schools offering AP CS?

My high school did not have qualified teachers. We had programming classes, but they didn't even cover AP CS A.

Schools without CS teachers should still offer the AP to give students credit for learning programming. Its not like teachers lecturing can teach people how to program anyways.

I did take the AP test even though I hadn't taken the class. The infrastructure was there because we did offer AP English and History.

You can take any AP exam you want, regardless of whether it's taught at your school.

Wish I had known that when I was actually in high school. I could probably have passed one or more of the history tests.

>So we can take take Nebraska and Alaska off the list.

I believe you mean "Alaska and Montana."

Whoops, thanks. Fixed

"I think this analysis is flawed."

I didn't see much in the way of analysis, just raw data and some highlights.

It's the highlights I take issue with.

They seem reasonable. It looks like you're making a big deal out of the idea that some states expect near zero participation from certain groups but the aggregate participation numbers seem pretty salient.

The obsession with race in the US is really fascinating as foreigner.

Are there a lot of other countries where this kind of data is compiled? I feel like I've never seen anything like it in France, but maybe I wasn't paying attention.

This sort of data is compiled in quite a few environments in the UK (race surveys go out with all sorts of things) such that entities (especially government ones) can ensure that they are conforming to 'equal opportunities' legislation.

I appreciate the sentiment behind it and think that it makes sense, but every time I see one I can't help but be amused that such legislation is directly responsible for dozens of government departments sending out questionnaires about peoples' race [1] where they previously did not. :)

[1]: These are, of course, suitably anonymised after the fact. No worries there.

The United States has a history where over six million people were imported from Africa and enslaved, who continued to be denied basic civil and voting rights for a century after emancipation. And even today one of the strongest predictors of socioeconomic class, voting patterns, health outcomes, urban-vs-suburban-vs-rural residence, likelihood of committing or being victim of a crime, and exposure to quality educational resources is socially- and self-identified race. It's only natural that governments, businesses, and health officials would be interested in statistics on it.

France's national pre-occupations are pretty different, I expect. I suspect a closer analogy would be to the relations between French settlers and indigenous Muslims in Algeria.

Well, we actually have a lot of different races represented here.

the thing is, there is a very strong awareness of race in us society, and it factors into a host of conscious and unconscious decisions. the net effect is that the "tilt" of the field you play on is sharply affected by your race. also, since society is in many ways fairly segregated along racial lines, your background and environment are often a factor of your race too.

officially ignoring that fact does not level the field; it just lets the people favoured by the inequities in the current setup continue to have the luxury of ignorance, while everyone else struggles along with no help from the system.

tl;dr: calling it an "obsession with race" does the people actually trying to help by compiling this data a signal disservice

I believe this has more to do with CS in public schools versus race and gender issues. I went to Palo Alto High School, got a college degree in CS, and was not even aware my high school offered AP computer science until after I graduated...

Our local high school, about 20 minutes away from Palo Alto in another affluent neighborhood, offers AP CS but doesn't have a teacher for it. That means they are counted in the statistics of how many high schools offer it. If you want it, you can take it online. I wonder how many kids bother to take it that way.

The school has a terrific athletics program with great facilities but can't come up with a CS teacher in a neighborhood where most of the parents work for software companies.

How much does being a CS high school teacher pay vs working for a software company?

It could be difficult to find a qualified person with a CS degree willing to work for teacher's pay in and around Palo Alto. There are probably some pretty high opportunity costs.

It's unlikely to be about pay, since there are a lot of 50-something or retired programmers around here who could teach Java in their sleep, would be happy with teachers' hours, teachers' vacations, teachers' "delivery dates", and teachers' pay, which is pretty good in this area, and are unlikely to be hired by Google, Apple, Oracle, or a YC startup.

I think the more likely problem is the state requirements for public school teachers, which would come down to about two years of political re-education camp, which such programmers wouldn't put up with. The elite private schools around here pay less than the public schools (yes, less) and yet they all seem to have CS (and other subject) teachers. Their teachers tend to be quite a bit older and have subject matter degrees and/or professional experience rather than education degrees.

Here's a Google spreadsheet for those of us without an xlsx viewer installed:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApVHgXTTTuMfdEF...

Original title: "Zero women, African Americans, or Hispanics take AP CS Exam in some states."

Why changed?

HN often changes titles when the moderators feel that it's inaccurate or flamebait-y.

In this case, I think it's the entire reason to read the article.

Curious stuff.

Looking at the sheets [0] for Maryland, where I live...

2007 Black - Pass Rate: 11.40%, Enrollment: 114, Percentage of Enrollment: 14.10%

2008 Black - Pass Rate: 36.48%, Enrollment: 74, Percentage of Enrollment: 8.26%

2009 Black - Pass Rate: 21.66%, Enrollment: 120, Percentage of Enrollment: 11.56%

2010 Black - Pass Rate: 17.89%, Enrollment: 190, Percentage of Enrollment: 14.05%

Things have evened out a bit since, but I'd love to know what if anything was going on there? Changing teachers? Smaller class sizes?

0: http://home.cc.gatech.edu/ice-gt/uploads/556/DetailedStateIn...

For those who don't know much about the AP CS course, I found it really awkward when I took it in high school. The exam involved a lot of writing Java...in pencil. Not an experience I ever want to repeat.

Meh. Writing code in pencil was annoying, but I was perfectly well able to finish all the exam questions in the allotted time, despite having the world's worst handwriting, and not having actually taken the course.

Imagine how much worse it was when it was in C++! ;)

Writing code on paper was a practice I initially resented when taking CS courses at University. However, it made me a better programmer, because it forced me to think about design and data structures first, then about the code.

Let me be clear: I think it's a great way to test students as long as the graders/instructors aren't overly anal about syntax or even API correctness. I was lucky to have teachers who were okay with unbalanced parentheses, made-up API functions, and in upper-division classes, pseudo code was even acceptable (data structures). (However most CS classes will be biased towards imperative programming over functional programming).

To use a cooking analogy, if you have to think about how you are cutting the fish, you won't be able to think about how you are going to prepare or cook the fish. Writing code on paper forced me to think about design first; that is, it enabled me to think about what I was going to do with the fish.

How many schools offer AP CS? I know in some areas of the midwest schools had no AP courses and advanced students could take college courses for high school credit.

year #schools

2008 1778

2009 1879

2010 2048

2011 1972

2012 2103

2013 2253

According to the spread sheet, this is the numbers per year of schools that offered it nationally. (5A - 12B on Sheet1)

Who knew Tennessee was so progressive?

Of course percentages are ambiguous without a population size and other factors.

I remember there being two tests: A and AB. When did that change?

They made it one exam starting 2010.

Are they still using the fishies (Marine Biology Case Study)?

I still have nightmares involving aquafish.h

Texas leading the way in diversity!

EDIT: Removed unflattering remark.

Number of Japanese trans-men in the 100-meter olympic dash: 0. I think I need a million-dollar grant to raise awareness of this issue.

I would hope that on Hacker News it could be recognized that computer science has a bit of a higher position in society than the 100-meter Olympic dash.

Not to mention the relative sample sizes involved, or the methods by which quality is determined.

Basically, this comparison is nonsensical.

Fine, change "100-meter olympic dash" to "professional athlete in the USA". Sample size is sufficient (NBA+NFL+NHL+MLB comprise of 3000+ players), athletes hold a much higher position in society than computer scientists, and quality is easy to determine (# of wins, points, rebounds, interceptions, etc). Number of japanese trans-men in pro-sports in the US: 0, afaik. We need to tackle this issue as a nation, immediately.

Programming ability is not determined by biology, try again.

Wow. This is completely inexcusable.. what's happening in Mississippi?

The two people who took the test in Mississippi were white males.

Pro tip: look at the actual data. The sample sizes are way to small to attempt to draw conclusions like these.

We don't know that the two people in Mississippi were white males, because as the note at the top of the spreadsheet says, the College Board does not release information for demographic groups with less than 5 members. That means several of the statements made on the page are not provable using the data provided because the sample sizes are too small.

Also, Wyoming should not even be mentioned. I find it somewhat dishonest to talk about states that had no members of X demographic group take a test when nobody in the state took it.

It would be much more interesting to weight the numbers to state demographics. Is anybody surprised that North Dakota or Montanna has low incidence of African Americans taking the test? I hope not, considering they represent only 1.2% and 0.4% of the states, respectively.

Mississippi is the absolute worst state in the entire US, in virtually all demographics. Highest obesity rate, highest incarceration rate, lowest GDP, lowest HDI, highest religiosity, lowest education rankings and so on.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/28000lk.html

>> highest religiosity

Categorizing that as a bad demographic in isolation is just as ignorant as arguing that evolution has no place in a science education.

It was more meant to be ironic.

So you've never TA'ed a calculus class where you ask the religion major to compute the integral of exp(x) and she says she has no idea, but she'll do well on the exam thanks to Jesus. I have.

No, but I've been through 8 years of religious education and can hold an intelligent conversation about why evolution and the Big Bang are the same conclusions I would reach as a scientist, so I get a bit miffed when people confuse my faith for irrationality.

I get a bit miffed when people confuse my faith for irrationality.

By definition it is. Religion contradicts rationalism. What you're doing is compartmentalizing. You're applying certain thought processes and methods of reasoning to everything besides your religion.

Regardless, this is not an attack on your belief and I never intended to come off as hostile. What I had in mind were the fundamentalists and fanatics who insist that lack of faith leads to decadence.

>> Religion contradicts rationalism >> You're applying certain thought processes and methods of reasoning to everything besides your religion

No - I have reasons for believing everything I do. They're not easily verifiable or repeatable by others, hence not scientific, but I don't just suspend belief or believe because I want to.

Thus unsubstantiated. They hold no weight and should not be used to justify decisions, especially not political ones.

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