[Edu-sig] Could there be a new test, call it AP something else?

[Litvin]

At 11:50 PM 1/25/2010, David MacQuigg wrote:
>Why does the AP test have to be offered in just one language?  Why 
>do we need to make a "tremendous effort" to move teachers from one 
>language to another?  Couldn't every school-district make it's own 
>choice of language?  Do colleges really expect specific training in 
>a particular language?

Dave,

The College Board is a huge bureaucracy and operates as such.  I am 
not associated with them in any way but I do follow closely what they 
do in CS.  My intention was not to defend their policies or 
procedures, but simply to state some facts of life.  My wife (and 
co-author) is a College Board "consultant" for New England, which 
means she conducts workshops and summer institutes for teachers -- 
she's taught hundreds of teachers.  She has been grading AP exams for 
13 years, and was on the College Board's "ad hoc committee for 
teacher professional development in Java."  The fact that such a 
committee was set up speaks for itself.

High school CS teachers -- and I've met many of them, personally and 
via email -- are not professional programmers.  They don't spend 
their days studying new languages or programming tools.  Some have 
experience working in the industry; most have no CS degree and are 
self-trained.  Many also teach math.  Some take a week-long summer 
course and that's their whole preparation from scratch for teaching 
an AP CS class in September.  It is not easy for an average teacher 
to quickly learn a new programming language or methodology.  The 
following quote from today's ap-compsci listserv gives a little history:
The first APCS exam was in 1984; Pascal was the language used.  In 
1999 the language was switched to C++; in 2004, the language was 
switched to Java.
My impression is that AP doesn't contemplate language switches 
lightly; as you can see, Pascal was the language of use for fifteen 
years.  The process to switch over from Pascal to C++ took a full 
five years, when you look at the development of the exam, 
instructional materials and training for teachers, case study, and so 
on.  In one of those weird little quirks of history, Java blossomed 
onto the scene in the middle of that transition ... my sense from 
what I've heard is that APCS would've moved straight to Java if it 
could have, but the move to C++ was underway too far to attempt to 
redirect that change.  Gratefully, the transition from C++ to Java 
wasn't nearly as difficult, with both languages being object-oriented 
and sharing common syntax.
Jim Huggins, Kettering University, Flint MI
Gary Litvin
www.skylit.com
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