If you’re not following @AP_Trevor on Twitter, you really should be. He’s the senior VP on AP and instruction at the College Board and tweets out some really great stuff about AP exams.
Right now he’s tweeting out information about exam results as they’re coming in. We’re going to look at a few of the CompSci ones since that’s what we’re about here.
AP Computer Science has expanded from 26,000 to 61,000 students since 2012, when the most frequent score was a 1. This year: it’s a 5.
— Trevor Packer (@AP_Trevor) June 12, 2017
This one is the most impressive to me. Last year almost 60,000 students took the CompSci AP-A exam. Looks like they broke the 60,000 barrier this year. And the most common score was a 5. That’s amazing.
The 2017 AP Computer Scienc e A scores 5: 24.4%; 4: 20.9%; 3: 21.9%; 2: 11.5%; 1: 21.3%. These may shift slightly as late exams are scored.
— Trevor Packer (@AP_Trevor) June 12, 2017
And here are the score ranges. Like normal there are few 2s and the others are spread out. But almost 25% made a 5, and that’s really impressive.
105 students, out of 61,000 worldwide, earned all 80 points possible on this year’s AP Computer Science A Exam.
— Trevor Packer (@AP_Trevor) June 12, 2017
Wow! On the other exams there’s maybe 5 or 10 students getting perfect scores, and some of those are out of 200,000 tests. 105 out of 61,000 doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is.
AP Computer Science A students dominated the 2nd free-response question (class design); more than half the students earned 8-9 pts out of 9.
— Trevor Packer (@AP_Trevor) June 12, 2017
Looks like the time spent on class design, interfaces, and abstract classes paid off for a lot of students. MultPractice had really high scores.
On the other hand, 30% of AP Computer Science A students were stumped by Q3 (string processing), earning 0 pts: https://t.co/JZUaDzfq0G
— Trevor Packer (@AP_Trevor) June 12, 2017
This question was weird, and I could see it being tough. Although I’d bet quite a few of those zeroes were due to not understanding what the question was asking.