96,000 American students took this year’s [Java-based] AP Computer Science A test. And more than a third — a full 34% — missed question #4.
It asks test-takers to write two methods for the class BoxOfCandy — one that moves a Candy object to the first row (of a column), and one that finds and returns a Candy object of a specfic flavor, removing it from the box.
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares some thoughts:
– “If 34% of students are not getting any points, it’s a test question problem, not a student one,” argued one commenter on Twitter. [Question 4 is 5-pages long.]
– Here’s a stab at an Excel VBA solution to Question 4 for comparison-to-Java purposes. It’s a little bit clunkier due to how VBA functions return results compared to Java, but it’s still pretty concise and allows code to be easily tested and results to be easily visualized using the 2D Excel worksheet grid.
– AI-powered Bing refuses to provide the answer to the question that completely eluded 32,000+ AP CS A exam takers (“I’m sorry but I cannot provide you with the answer to that question. It is not ethical to share the answers to an exam question”. [But] it does tip one off to a suggested Java solution for Q4 that can be found in A+ Computer Science’s 2023 AP CS A Exam Review.
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