Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1400214.1400225
Education
reprogramming college
Preparatory computer science

The college preparatory computer science education curriculum must be improved, beginning with the earliest phases of the process.

In EArLY APriL, the College Board announced the cancellation of the Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science “AB” course, the more advanced of two AP computing courses that enable students to study college-level content while still in high school. Citing low participation in the “AB” course, the College Board’s communication to AP teachers declared its increased commitment to the Computer Science “A” course, stating, “ Appropriate College Board committees will focus their efforts on improving and supporting the AP Computer Science A program, which will be enhanced during the next five years to better represent a full-year, entry-level college computer science sequence.” This attention toward rethinking college preparatory computer science education calls critical attention to the educational crisis in this field.

photo Graph by miGuel borGes

This announcement should not have come as a surprise to those who have been following computer science education. High school computing courses have shown signs of distress for the past several years. Even for the more popular “A” exam, student participation has declined 15% since the peak enrollment in 2002. Though these participation rates have flattened out over the past two years, the number of exam-takers in AP Computer Science has failed to mirror the increasing number of high school students taking AP exams in other sub-

jects. In fact, since 2002, the average number of students taking AP exams across all subjects has increased by 58%.

Part of the problem of low student enrollment in AP Computer Science can be attributed to the unique challenges teachers encounter in building and sustaining this course. As a former AP Computer Science teacher in a diverse urban high school, I experienced a sense of isolation in teaching a subject with little collegial support and a steep learning curve. As a social science researcher, I have studied the obstacles in creating and maintaining rigorous computer science courses in complex school structures. Since 2004, I have led professional development programs for Los Angeles AP Computer Science teachers and have

encountered numerous challenges to the recruitment and retention of teachers who possess the requisite knowledge to teach this course. Over the past 10 years, I have witnessed the official AP Computer Science programming language change from Pascal to C++ in 1999 and from C++ to Java in 2004. Last year, the case study accounting for up to 25% of the questions on the AP exam changed from the Marine Biology Simulation to the Grid World Simulation.

For any high school teacher, even those with adequate foundational knowledge and collegial support, keeping up with these modifications is quite a challenge. Few other subjects in the AP program, or in any high school course for that matter, encounter this level of fluctuation that has