
Female, minority students took AP computer science in record numbers - MilnerRoute
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/08/27/female-minority-students-took-ap-computer-science-record-numbers/1079699002/
======
AlphaWeaver
Increased participation in AP Computer Science courses is only marginally
beneficial, I think.

In high school I took the AP Computer Science course after working with Java
for years, thinking it'd be an easy A. Was that ever far from the truth.

My issue was that the quality of the course was plain terrible. Any school in
my state (North Carolina) which didn't have an in-person teacher could offer
the class through our statewide online course program, and the state of the
course on there was dreadful. Typos everywhere, incorrect and trick questions
on the exams. A friend of mine in a similar situation as me had to email the
instructor four times with the message "I DID include what you graded me off
for, it's on line 44" before the instructor looked at line 44.

Broadening participation in computing is crucial, but we also need to devote
serious attention to cleaning up the curriculum. If we don't, we'll end up
making more kids hate Computer Science than like it.

~~~
applecrazy
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).

~~~
Cthulhu_
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).

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

------
todd8
The headline exaggerates the gains for women. From the article:

    
    
        This year: total. = 135992 up 31% over last year
                   female =  38195 up 39% over last year
    

From this we can calculate last years numbers:

    
    
        Last year: total  = 103811
                   female =  27478
    

Comparing total participation:

    
    
        This year: female/total = 26.5%
        Last year: female/total = 28.1%
    

African-Americans and Hispanic and Latino students made more robust gains. The
gains for women might not even be statistically significant.

~~~
SamUK96
It would be useful to calculate the percentage difference between
n_group/n_population and n_group_course/n_course. This would essentially
calculate a "representivity" score for that course.

So, for example, according to the 2010 US Census, Black or African Americans
constitute 12.6% of the population. However, according to [1], they constitute
only ~5% of the CS degrees awarded. Therefore the score for CS and Black or
African Americans is |12.6 - 5|/12.6 = ~60% underrepresentation.

[1]
[https://datausa.io/profile/cip/110701/#demographics](https://datausa.io/profile/cip/110701/#demographics)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
This negates the idea that a certain demographic may be disinclined to a
particular subject (which is equivalent to being inclined towards other
subjects).

One needs access to courses without unnecessary discrimination, one does not
need to be pushed in to courses simply to make their representation scores
better.

------
dawidw
I think we should be interested in someone's achievements, not on sex, skin
colour, height, weight, clothes etc. of that person.

~~~
mywittyname
We don't live in a perfect world; we live in a world where people face blatant
and systematic discrimination based on their physical characteristics.

Given this, we have two choices: pretend that the world is a fair place where
merit is all that matters, or we can attempt to boost those who've been
treated unfairly with the hope that society will gradually improve because of
it.

Your statement makes me think you're a pretender.

------
surbas
Female minorities are a woahfully under represented at today's software
companies. This article is great news and shouldn't be shaded by "well it was
harder in my day" BS.

~~~
djschnei
Is the goal simply to boost the numbers of some arbitrary group of people
clumped together because of their immutable characteristics? Or is the goal to
improve the output and speed of innovation in an industry by exposing more
people to it? If it's the former, you're probably right. If it's the latter,
being concerned about sacrificed quality is not "BS".

~~~
Retric
You get more innovation by having a wider pool of talent to draw from. That
likely more than counters reducing the 'quality' of what is at best an
introductory course.

It's not about skin color, it's a question of having for example a blind team
member causing the team to think about a wider set of issues.

~~~
asdkhadsj
But shouldn't we just hire people based on whatever qualifications we deem an
indicator to talent, skill, ethic, etc?

Does being a woman, disabled, ethnic, etc bring meaningful insight to
designing a network protocol? Is that a quantifiable thing? I suspect both of
these answers are a resounding no.

Lets care what talent and interests people have. Lets give them the education
they need to pursue those interests. Creating groups of people by what I
consider irrelevant details like what organs they have and then forcing them
into certain occupations does not seem likely to make better network
protocols. I frankly am always puzzled that people who fight for equality,
simultaneously care so much about what's between our legs.

Now, if you think the blind, or women, or w/e are interested in STEM/etc but
due to culture they avoid it? Great, that's something we can work with. Lets
work on trying to change culture for new generations. Don't force them into
STEM, but ensure that children who are interested in STEM can follow it,
regardless of gender.

~~~
wastedhours
> due to culture they avoid it

And do you know one of the best ways to change the culture? Get more people
from different backgrounds in the room.

> Creating groups of people by what _I_ consider irrelevant details > ensure
> that children who are interested in STEM can follow it, regardless of gender

People massively underestimate the importance of role models and empathy in
career decision making. At some point you need to jump start it and use
contextual signs to plot future potential.

We're not talking about a C grade Person being chosen over an A+ Person, but
if you have an A+ grade Person and an A- grade Person, and the latter is from
an underrepresented group, then taking into consideration the context of the
latter entering an industry that's seen as "not for them" based on the
demographic of those inside of it already, can imply they have greater
potential for success.

I'm expecting this line of argument to get me downvotes on HN, but contextual
recruitment, and that increasing levels of diversity on all teams being a good
thing (even if it means, within a few percentage points, hiring for potential
than current expertise), is a fairly uncontroversial thing in the world of
recruitment.

~~~
emodendroket
> We're not talking about a C grade Person being chosen over an A+ Person, but
> if you have an A+ grade Person and an A- grade Person, and the latter is
> from an underrepresented group, then taking into consideration the context
> of the latter entering an industry that's seen as "not for them" based on
> the demographic of those inside of it already, can imply they have greater
> potential for success.

Honestly, we are even talking about making way for someone of equal, or even
higher, raw talent but of a different background. To say otherwise takes the
(in my opinion obviously not justified) premise that without any intervention
hiring functions as a perfect meritocracy.

~~~
mbrumlow
That is where I take issue.

You are wrapping up the measure of raw potential based off gender and skin
color. You can't make any assumptions about that based off those two things.
You don't know if you are looking at a wealthy black kid, or a poor white kid,
you don't know which house hold had a dysfunctional abusive situation based
off skin or gender. You can't tell which one was made fun of in school and
bullied. You can't even say which one had actually had more exposure to
whatever field you are hiring for. You just can't, that is not how it works.

You are being racist and sexist if you make assumptions about a individual
based off their skin color or gender. How all the sudden you know somebodies
background because you have negative views about what it must have been like
to be born a certain color or gender. And don't tell me that you are not doing
that, otherwise you would be using some other metric than gender or color to
suggest the things you are suggesting. I would be furious if I just got done
interviewing with you and you thought I had high raw talent because of my skin
color or gender.

I have said many times when this topic comes up. If you really want to make
change you have to do so at the beginning of the pipe line, when the kids are
young. Support for low income single parent family's (any race). Ensure the
environment is well suited for girls to take part in tech activities (e.g.
treat everybody the same). I don't buy the "needs roll models" argument at
all. Kids / people are either going to like program or not. And if the
problems is "there are too many dudes" in tech then maybe we should all stop
vilifying the men in tech and create environments where both sexes can learn
to calibrate and work together. After reading stuff from vice, and the like no
wonder girls/women would be terrified to work with men.

tl;dr Do everybody a favor and stop imagining how disadvantage somebody is
based off their skin color, or gender, you really have no clue.

~~~
emodendroket
You have misunderstood the point so badly it almost seems willful. The scale
is already tipped; AA policies are an attempt to fix that, not to promote
mediocrities.

For instance consider this work showing that, given the exact same resume,
employers are less likely to call back applicants whose names sound black:
[https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15...](https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/jalen-
ross/black-name-resume-50-percent-less-likely-get-respo/)

> The [identical] resumes with white-sounding names spurred 50 percent more
> callbacks than the ones with black-sounding names.

> After responding to 1,300 ads with more than 5,000 resumes, the researchers
> found that the job applicants with white names needed to send 10 resumes to
> get one callback, but the black candidate needed to send 15 for one.

> It didn’t matter whether the employer was a federal contractor or was
> described as an "equal opportunity employer," as those also discriminated
> like the others.

> "We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring
> something other than race, such as social class, from the names," their
> paper states. "These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a
> prominent feature of the labor market."

~~~
mbrumlow
I have actually read that paper and it is fairly old at this point, and other
studies like it more recently have concluded different results.

While your quote mentions class, and asserts that they were not getting
signals from class -- one look at the name list chosen for white people will
show you how they did not properly control for class. For example they have
almost no low class names on the white side. I am sure adding a Bo, Ada,
Billy, Bucephelus, Cleatus or Clyde would have for sure changed the callback
results on whites.

At the time the study was done I was working at a company that would have
never posted a advertisement in a paper, but would have called every single
last person both white and black back. The suggestion is that people who
posted in papers might have been of a different age group and other means of
replying to a job ad such as email at the time may have produced more balanced
results.

There is also the issue of the name being disliked and not actually the
perceived color of the person. Aversion to unfamiliar ethnic names is entirely
different than hating black people. While it is will play out poorly for those
with such names it does not guarantee that the same person with a different
name would have experienced the same callback rate. This is a phenomena that
transcends race. This also is probably a good time to point out assimilation
is part of living in a mixed race society. If I recall correctly, the notion
of black names started sometime after the 1960s. This happened more so in low-
income racially divided areas. It was part of Afrocentrism. While there is
nothing wrong with that in general, it can have unintended consequences that
are not necessarily racially charged. Meanwhile other immigrants had taken on
more traditionally American names, as a result those groups seemed to have
done very well in the US (Asians). To keep it short, sometimes it does not pay
to be unique.

But none of that matters, because I never claimed there was no discrimination.
But I have repeatedly stated how to solve the problem without using more
discrimination. That is to pump money and education efforts into low income
areas. More aid to single parent families, access to computers (not just
access, but actual computers in their names). Classes on personal finance, and
dealing with money. Cultivating a notion of delayed gratification. Paid
classes for low income parents to learn more about what they can do to make
their child successful. Subsidized match savings accounts that are released in
full on graduating high school. And 3 free meals at low income schools. I
think it would also be interesting to see how to desegregate low income black
schools from low income white schools. Don't forget the teachers! Competitive
salaries that can support hiring the best of the teachers for these areas.

This is the key because it gives the kids real tools for life that will serve
them regardless of how they are treated once they get out of school. A good
education also helps with racism in general. If you look the people thinking
about these issue and trying things are very educated. If you target poor
areas with a relentless education effort both whites and non-whites will be
educated, and in return lower the total racial tension, creating a new wave of
diversity that will be a lasting one.

~~~
emodendroket
> There is also the issue of the name being disliked and not actually the
> perceived color of the person. Aversion to unfamiliar ethnic names is
> entirely different than hating black people. While it is will play out
> poorly for those with such names it does not guarantee that the same person
> with a different name would have experienced the same callback rate. This is
> a phenomena that transcends race. This also is probably a good time to point
> out assimilation is part of living in a mixed race society. If I recall
> correctly, the notion of black names started sometime after the 1960s. This
> happened more so in low-income racially divided areas. It was part of
> Afrocentrism. While there is nothing wrong with that in general, it can have
> unintended consequences that are not necessarily racially charged. Meanwhile
> other immigrants had taken on more traditionally American names, as a result
> those groups seemed to have done very well in the US (Asians). To keep it
> short, sometimes it does not pay to be unique.

In case you've forgotten, black people were brought to this country against
their will and their culture, heritage, and genealogical record was
deliberately destroyed. Choosing a black name is a small attempt to reverse
that tremendous damage. To turn around and say that if they want to be
successful they have to "assimilate" is to me a position that's indefensible.
You may also remember that the position of black workers was actually not more
equal before the 1960s.

I am also not very reassured to hear that maybe they're merely rejecting
people with the wrong class background out of hand.

> But none of that matters, because I never claimed there was no
> discrimination. But I have repeatedly stated how to solve the problem
> without using more discrimination. That is to pump money and education
> efforts into low income areas. More aid to single parent families, access to
> computers (not just access, but actual computers in their names). Classes on
> personal finance, and dealing with money. Cultivating a notion of delayed
> gratification. Paid classes for low income parents to learn more about what
> they can do to make their child successful. Subsidized match savings
> accounts that are released in full on graduating high school. And 3 free
> meals at low income schools. I think it would also be interesting to see how
> to desegregate low income black schools from low income white schools. Don't
> forget the teachers! Competitive salaries that can support hiring the best
> of the teachers for these areas.

All these solutions presume the inferiority of black candidates when we're
looking at the reality that _identical credentials_ are less valued from black
candidates. The idea that black people are uniquely lacking in "delayed
gratification" is also bordering on offensive racist caricature.

It is all well and good to improve the schooling circumstances of black
students, but it seems equally important to make it so black candidates do not
have to be overwhelmingly superior to even be considered over white ones.

~~~
mbrumlow
> black people were brought to this country against their will and their
> culture

This is a nice argument for maybe the first few generations, but all of us,
you and me and everybody had no choice where we were born even what color we
are. People get shuffled and moved around this earth for all sorts of
misfortunate reasons. You also have to deal with the fact that there has been
voluntary immigration of blacks since slavery. I was just reading how more
sub-Saharan immigrants have came to the US since slavery than the entirety of
those shipped here by slave traders. Much of the renewed culture has been
attributed to those with a choice and fresh connections to Africa.

> I am also not very reassured to hear that maybe they're merely rejecting
> people with the wrong class background out of hand.

Nobody said it was good that anybody would do it, but it is entirely different
problem that is not racism, and something that is within the power of change.
A person can't change his skin color to get a better chance at a job, but a
person can change their name. This goes for people of all color born with a
name that does not perform as well. A white Harvard grad with the name Butkiss
is likely going to have trouble true. The point is discrimination on immutable
characteristics is what we are fighting here.

> All these solutions presume the inferiority of black candidates when we're
> looking at the reality that identical credentials are less valued from black
> candidates. The idea that black people are uniquely lacking in "delayed
> gratification" is also bordering on offensive racist caricature.

Please go read my comment again. My solutions are applied to the poor, not by
race, that is my entire point. Fix the poor problem and the race issues
described in this thread go away. Why? Because we will have more people
educated, including whites that may have grown up to be racist or at least had
bias tendencies. Affirmative action is like taking pain killers for a curable
problem. Educating the masses and raising the bar for all is the actual cure.
I feel you have grossly interpret something from my comments that is totally
off basis. The ability to display delayed gratification is one of the biggest
indicators of future success in life, and it is something that is probably not
taught by the parents of the poor, I know it was not in my household. No
assumption about the candidates were being made at all, although many have
suggested considering a lower marked minority over a higher marked white
person. I don't make derogatory generalization about any group identified by a
immutable characteristic. The only sensible thing to do when two candidates
who are equally qualified for a position is simply flip a coin. This would
remove any bias and over time have a more natural result in what you are
attempting to achieve.

> It is all well and good to improve the schooling circumstances of black
> students, but it seems equally important to make it so black candidates do
> not have to be overwhelmingly superior to even be considered over white
> ones.

Again, I said poor, not black students, poor. I am not concerned with the
candidates. Quite simply if a qualified black candidate does not get the job
because of his race then that is discrimination and should be dealt with,
there are means to do so already in place. I am 100% on board with everybody
having an equal opportunity. If you can show that somebody is selecting one
candidate over another based on things like color (especially to
underrepresented people), then we should be going after them full force and
ensuring they correct their hiring processes. You simply can't create a right
with two wrongs. Once you give people the power to discriminate it is hard to
go back.

Nobody should ever not get a job because they had the wrong skin color, and
when you say chose somebody based off skin color you are ensuring the number
of people who don't get a job because of their skin color goes, not down. We
should be striving to remove race based decisions from our society not adding
them.

~~~
emodendroket
If you think everything is dandy if people don't get jobs because their names
sound too poor or too ethnic then we just don't share the same basic
worldview.

~~~
mbrumlow
You are being completely dishonest. Don't put words in my mouth. I never said
such a thing or implied it.

All I am doing is pointing out the difference between that and selcting
somebody based off color.

This is the second time you have resorted to paiting a dishonest view of me
instead of attacking my points...

~~~
emodendroket
I don't see what the difference is. Even if the intent of binning "Jamal's"
resume and keeping "Jake's" isn't overtly racist the effect is obviously
discriminatory.

~~~
mbrumlow
You are right, the result may be the same. But it is important to properly
label and address the issues.

This is part of the entire issue as a whole. And partly why I think the there
are better solutions to the problem. Intent matters. If you apply a race based
solution to a problem that was incorrectly identified as a race based issue it
is sure to fail. You could call it discriminatory but the entire selection
process is just that. What I think we all care about is why a given individual
was chosen or not.

In a attempt to maybe find some common ground. How would you feel about this
solution be applied at the end of the pipeline; What if when there are two or
more candidates with the same qualifications, the candidate is randomly
selected? This will remove any bias by the selector, and over time would
ensure diversity would result in matching the local population.

I also figured out why I have such a hard time with blindly selecting a given
race in terms of programming. No pun intended, it creates a race condition. In
your scenario if a white person and a black person always submitted their
resume, and the black person is always selected then then white person might
apply to 100 jobs and get selected, if it so happens that 100 black people
also applied with the same qualifications. Because there is no global
accounting system per individual this very well can happen, and has happened,
and is the exact thing we are trying to solve. Nobody can guarantee there will
be a scenario when this white person will submit a resume indefinitely and
indefinitely not get selected because of the rule of always selecting a
minority over a white person. This is why I suggest adding a bit of randomness
to it.

So today we have have broken code, we can fix it, but we should fix it with
more correct code, not more broken code.

~~~
emodendroket
> What I think we all care about is why a given individual was chosen or not.

This presumption of yours is presumably why I'm not making any sense to you. I
don't really think it's relevant whether someone is consciously choosing to
discriminate on the basis of race or doing so unwittingly. Many -- probably
even most -- racist outcomes we see do not require overt, intentional racism.
Instead they come from unexamined and subconscious bias in circumstances where
the judgement is subjective enough that it's possible for the person making it
to fool themselves and others about what they're really doing. That's an
improvement over open, unabashed racism, but I don't think we can stop there
and say we're delivering anything resembling fairness. Having an aesthetic
distaste for cornrows or the name Lakeisha is one of the least subtle examples
of this happening.

> In a attempt to maybe find some common ground. How would you feel about this
> solution be applied at the end of the pipeline; What if when there are two
> or more candidates with the same qualifications, the candidate is randomly
> selected? This will remove any bias by the selector, and over time would
> ensure diversity would result in matching the local population.

In real-world scenarios you never have two completely identical candidates.
What John Dovidio has shown is that in these circumstances people doing the
judging have a strong tendency to decide which criteria to weigh most heavily
in a way that, in effect, favors the white candidate in any given instance
where both candidates are plausible. I don't think you can fix this solely by
changing the interviewing process except, maybe, by the kind of extremely
rigid and uniform government job interviewing process everyone talks about
hating.

~~~
mbrumlow
> racist outcomes

Its not racist if race was not the driving factor. I think that is the big
part of why there is so much push back. On this topic. You appear to be
viewing the outcome as raciest, but are not willing to see how other factors
may result in the same outcome. You have to understand how the outcomes came
about to being to fix it. I agree that there is discrimination and much of it
can be caused by subconscious bias. To repeat, assuming the cause based off
the outcome is completely incorrect. I do agree that people are and can be
doing exactly what you are saying, but it is hard to prove and not what is
happening in every case.

It is completely bad logic to assume racism is occurring because the results
are what one might expect had it occurred. You MUST understand the dynamics
before prescribing a solution.

> In real-world scenarios you never have two completely identical candidates.

I had a feeling you might say something like this, but I was hoping you could
see past my simple example. When I say same qualifications I mean a range that
is acceptable for the position at hand. Lets say we had a scale of 1 to 10 for
a marking system. And we have a job that requires between 7 and 9. We would
randomly select all candidates matching who were marked between 7 and 9. But
you do bring a problem I had thought about and why I hate mucking with the
hiring process at all, is the judging system. I think you are suggesting that
the judges will rank a group more poorly thus wont fit the bracket and thus
wont get the job -- thus we must select the underrepresented person by
default. If that is the case, then why have a rank at all, you seem to simply
say if underrepresented person applies they must be hired, because the person
judging the candidates for rank will give the underrepresented person lower
marks, and not get the job. I don't think this is the case but there is a
solution to make sure it is that still allows for random selection on equally
ranked Canada's. That is simply companies must keep a record of rankings and
document their decision's why they chose who they chose for a given job
position. These records can be audited at any time.

If you are dead set on the only solution is that a underrepresented person
must always be selected over a white person then I think we are done, and I
don't think we are going to changes each other's minds. I would be interested
in any other solutions you might have. While I have more ideas, I feel that I
have already struck out with you and can't put any more effort into this.

~~~
emodendroket
I don't agree with your definition of "racism" here. If it's racially
discriminatory in effect, by my reckoning, it's racist, even if no actor has
racist intent.

In the question of hiring, what I most favor is measures to reward the hiring
of a diverse workforce as a countervailing force to structural forces that
lead to racist outcomes. I feel this would work better than trying to impose
some method of hiring. This is not really that different from Affirmative
Action, which of course does not actually prescribe that minority candidates
most always be selected.

------
xutopia
As someone not from the United States the acronym "AP" really threw me off.
Had to look it up. It stands for Advanced Placement and despite its name is an
introductory class.

~~~
strictnein
It's a college level course offered to high school students. Not sure where
you're getting the idea that it's "introductory".

In American schools, the levels of a class on, say, European History would be:

European History -> Honors European History -> AP Euro History

You would just take one of them based on your ability and/or interest in the
subject.

Students can complete AP courses and, depending on how they score on the
exams, earn actual college credit at whatever school they end up at.

~~~
sannee
> It's a college level course offered to high school students.

I took the AP Physics C MITx course on edx (when I was in high school) and it
was way below the level of our college Physics 1 course (electrical
engineering, European university). Not saying it wasn't a great course (much
better than anything my high school offered), but it just wasn't as
mathematically rigorous.

Are introductory college classes in the US really so basic?

~~~
thaumasiotes
Yes.

~~~
astura
I think the answer is "depends on the school."

------
randyrand
I think it’s odd to limit the scope of the “minority” label of a global
industry to just the USA.

18.2 million software developers in the world.

only 3.6 million are from the usa. ~5.7 million are from india. 5.8 million
from china. etc.

No one race has the majority.

[https://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-
careers/ind...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-
careers/india-to-overtake-u-s--on-number-of-developers-by-2017.html)

~~~
hnbroseph
doesn't seem that odd to me given that the website is "usa today"...

~~~
randyrand
sure, but LA times doesn’t use the minority label with white people even
though they are a minority in LA.

In other words, the jurisdiction of the newspaper is not always what they use
when calculating the “minority” label.

A minority label depends on context, and IMO global context makes more sense
when talking about SWE.

~~~
hnbroseph
> global context makes more sense when talking about SWE

why would _any_ specific context "make more sense" when talking about SWE?

~~~
randyrand
Because SWE projects and companies are global.

The internet, mobile and desktop OSs are all global.

The top engineering companies have offices all over the world that work
together.

------
jarmitage
If you want to learn more about research into broadening participation in CS
in the US, I recommend Mark Guzdial's blog and publications:
[https://computinged.wordpress.com/](https://computinged.wordpress.com/)

This is a good talk from Mark about his (and others') work: "Meeting the needs
for a computationally literate society" (2017)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk9y09mmL9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk9y09mmL9M)

------
tropo
This is a half-truth, because there isn't really an AP Computer Science
anymore. From wikipedia:

"Due to low numbers of students taking the exam, AP Computer Science AB was
discontinued following the May 2009 exam administration."

Today's offering is, at best, some light familiarity with Java. That one is
called "AP Computer Science A". There is even a wholly useless "AP Computer
Science Principles" that involves writing small essays about non-technical
aspects of computing.

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surbas
I am not sure why you are saying this is a "half-truth." AP classes always had
a half-year courses (A) vs a year long study (AB.) The Comp Sci A test has
been taught for 20+ years, and looking at the cirrocumuli looks like a punch
list of today's typical junior dev interview, and looks equivalent to the real
first class (not survey) in any com sci program.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science_A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science_A)

~~~
nv-vn
In my experience that was not accurate at all to the real class. In reality,
we didn't cover about 50% of that at all (since it doesn't appear on the
test). Instead, it was all arrays and for loops then 3-4 questions about how
inheritance works and the free response questions that are graded based on
like 3 specific details that could appear in a solution rather than
correctness. This article seems like an advertisement for the class because it
doesn't reflect the actual content or exam at all.

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protomyth
I found a Medium post[1] that this article seems to lean heavily on, but I
don't see anywhere we can get the statistics. It would be really helpful as we
are trying to get some supporting data on Native Americans in CompSci.

1) [https://medium.com/@codeorg/girls-and-minorities-break-
recor...](https://medium.com/@codeorg/girls-and-minorities-break-records-in-
computer-science-as-fastest-growing-groups-39d23425810e)

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dvh
AP - advanced placement (no idea what that is)

~~~
protomyth
If you are in the US, its a program to take classes at a higher level than the
high school has. Its where all those folks with GPAs over 4.0 (4.0 being a
pretty standard of A) come from (I guess they go up to 5.0).

If you are in the US and have never encountered AP courses then you
experienced the fun of starting about 30 yards back in a 100 yard race for
that college admission fun.

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DocEasyE
female numbers sore for comp sci courses, 5 years later we have an over supply
of media marketing specialist lmao with no programming or technical skills and
a few great female programmers who naturally probably already thought like a
programmer bc they were taught to question why rather to accept facts as is.

