3 ms·

Shame... I remember pointers being the challenging part of the class.

• krschultz 19y ago
  Thats the problem with AP CS in Java. In our school CS 105 is the first programming class, it is C and you basically learn basic io/if/for/while/structs/pointers. If you take the AP class you skip CS 105 and therefore you jump into the next level class without having ever heard what a pointer was, looking for an ArrayList and wondering where the libraries. That next class is C++ and covers OOP and streams and templates and they get lost immediately. Worse, most of the kids in mine got 4 or 5s on the exam, and said they had never created a program from scratch before, since Java has so much boiler plate the teacher would give them a skeleton and they would have to fill in the methods, the whole idea of how to structure a program into functions was never taught to them. It sounded like it did more harm than good to me, I would rather see a high school CS class do some fun python robotics or graphics programming to get people interested and then when they hit college get into the details, don't let them skip the basics by taking a test that doesn't actually replace the amount of knowledge it says it does.