No Girls, Blacks, or Hispanics Take AP Computer Science Exam in Some States | Hacker News Reader

No Girls, Blacks, or Hispanics Take AP Computer Science Exam in Some States

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21 pointsbrudgers21 comments

This article sucks.

> In an interview, Ericson told me that a few points surprised her in the data, including that Mississippi, where 37 percent of the total population is African American, was one of the states with no African-American test-takers.

The thing they left out is that in the whole state of Mississippi just one single person took the exam! When you check out the stats of other states you discover that the number of people who took the test were in the dozens, not even hundreds:

> 11 states had no Black students take the exam: Alaska (21 exam takers -4.3% Black by population), Idaho (47 - 0.9% Black), Kansas (47 - 6.2% Black), Maine (161 - 1.0%), Mississippi (1 - 37.3%), Montana (11 - 0.67%), Nebraska (46 - 4.5%), New Mexico (57 - 3%), North Dakota (9 - 1%), Utah (103 - 1.2%), and Wyoming (0 - 1.2%).

> 8 states had no Hispanic students take the exam: Alaska (21 exam takers), Idaho (47), Kansas (47), Mississippi (1), Montana (11), Nebraska (46), North Dakota (9), and Wyoming (0).

> No females took the exam in Mississippi (1 exam taken), Montana (11 exams taken), and Wyoming (no exams).

So yea.. The usual attempt at manipulating numbers to get clicks. It just sucks, because this is a real issue to be addressed, but this kind of articles don't help.

There are nearly half a million public school students in MS. [1] Given MS's minority demographics [2], the fact that only one person took it speaks to the issue of access.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Education_in_Mississipp...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Mississippi#De...

And hardly anyone takes this exam because it's useless – what do you get in return for an AP CS score? All AP is useful for is getting out of general requirements in college, and no one has general requirements for CS. If you major in an area then AP seldom matters, as most departments don't care about how you got through the early courses so long as you take the more advanced courses.

what do you get in return for an AP CS score?

The same thing you get in return for any AP class, an extra point for GPA calculations. It's a pretty big deal.

The fact that so few people selected AP CS in these states deserves serious investigation.

It's easy to spin it that way, but to be fair, if you care about getting minorities into STEM, it shouldn't need to be a requisite that a bunch of white males take the test in your state first. (leaving aside the whole issue of whether AP computer science is a useful litmus test for that.)

Nobody said it's requisite, it's just who happened to take the test. This article poses it as an alarming issue yet the statistical significance of this data is barely worth mentioning. That's 11 out of the 50 states, and all of those states (with the number of test takers and minority proportions) have expected values of between .5 and 2 black students taking the test, most of them falling between .5-1.0. There is a lot of context missing from this data to know if it's actually significant and presenting on only this side of the data weakens their argument by opening an entire plethora of counter-arguments about their data being misleading.

>if you care about getting minorities into STEM //

Surely, what you should care about is giving all people the opportunity to enter the subject area of their choosing without unnecessary discrimination (eg based on unrelated factors). Just because there are students of a particular race that you want to take a subject to achieve your notion of perfect balance doesn't mean they should be unduly pressed towards that subject.

These figures probably give no useful information about equality of opportunity.

One thing to consider is that many rural states poor schools without AP programs. My high school in Idaho had 1 AP program for English and that was it.

If you want to be an active part of the solution, consider signing up for TEALS: http://tealsk12.org. In brief, you get to teach a high school computer science course without quitting your day job. Founded by a passionate guy who just happened to be at Microsoft, and right before he quit to incorporate a non-profit, a senior VP heard about the program and worked to get it official sponsorship. Although the small staff is funded by Microsoft, volunteer teaching staff is from all over.

edit: The staff has grown to include a handful of region managers. Removed an incorrect parenthetical from my post.

http://tealsk12.org looks really cool and seems to be making solid progress. As far as the AP for CS goes, I am NOT a fan of java. Based on the questions I have seen, many of the question are about quirky gotchas of the java language and have nothing to do with writing useful code. Python or Ruby would be a way better choice in my opinion.

They forgot to mention how many white/Asian male students took it in those states. I imagine it's not too many in some small states. That would change the headline, but then again, nobody would care about that headline.

The source data (summary anyway) is linked in the first paragraph:

No females took the exam in Mississippi (1 exam taken), Montana (11 exams taken), and Wyoming (no exams).

[...]

For states that had some females take the exam the percentage female ranged from 3.88% in Utah (4 out of 103) to 29% in Tennessee (73 out of 251). However, 30 of Tenn females can be attributed to a girls only school that offers AP CS A.

11 states had no Black students take the exam: Alaska (21 exam takers -4.3% Black by population), Idaho (47 - 0.9% Black), Kansas (47 - 6.2% Black), Maine (161 - 1.0%), Mississippi (1 - 37.3%), Montana (11 - 0.67%), Nebraska (46 - 4.5%), New Mexico (57 - 3%), North Dakota (9 - 1%), Utah (103 - 1.2%), and Wyoming (0 - 1.2%).

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

However, 30 of Tenn females can be attributed to a girls only school that offers AP CS A.

Why isn't this a story? Is there any research into this? Is there an effect here that we should be looking for?

http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/APcompscidata/Dashbo...

What a pointless bubble chart. If you graph the number of test takers, then of course the states with the largest population (CA, TX) will have the largest bubbles.

This mistake is commonly called making a heatmap of population. Works for nearly any variable - if not per-capita, then you just get a population map. Gun deaths, Methodist ministers, furries, whatever.

If a person random person on the internet looks at it naively, it doesn't provide much information. A person who knows about the US educational system there are anomalies.

Compare IL to PA or MD to FL and NY.

Use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Us_state_population as reference.

At my sci-tech magnet high school, there was only one girl in our AP CS class. This was a place where everyone took multiple AP classes, and a sizeable fraction of the class took AP Calc BC in the junior year. Interestingly, there was a pretty even gender representation in BC Calc (40-45% girls), which makes the underrepresentation in CS even more baffling.

We can start taking statistics seriously when the presentation of the statistics is done meticulously. The bubble chart should be done on a per one hundred thousand population, like they do for murders (something JoeAltmaier mentioned).

In the never ending war to identify differences in systems, why are we looking out outputs and not inputs? Here we are simply looking at metrics of 14,674 test takers in 2003 and 39,278 in 2014.

Who chooses where to offer the AP Computer Science test?

AP Computer Science has to be selected by a school to offer the test, the school district administrator has an incentive to do this as they get a bonus based on the number of test takers. The risk is that a school will have all failing students so the administrator and reflect badly on the administrator. The administrator needs to identify the schools that provide the best opportunity for success, where computer classes have already taken root and have a pipeline of qualified student to take a test with an average score of 2.9.

Who are the students taking the test?

Computer programming requires mathematics, logic, and other functions. It takes hours of personal development, failure, and problem solving in programming. Why do the white / asian / males have a proclivity toward this? A more direct question would be to ask why are the asian females not taking the test, if we could identify this, we could identify inputs that would change the outputs from the system.

Please stop looking at the outputs and saying change the outputs, you simply find metric abuse.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science

FYI: the data this article is based is discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7052547

Also note that the article itself is from January 2014.

If I remember correctly, the AP already tried to eliminate the CS courses because the lack of diversity was making them look bad.

To be fair - I went to one of the top high schools in the country, albeit in Alabama. We didn't have too many White or Indian males taking the exam either.

The course/exam itself was quite awful when I took it - a bunch of outdated Java if I remember correctly.

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