Well, another AP exam has come and gone.
\nThe 2012 exam is now in the rear view mirror.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s exam is proof that you will never get the Bugs out of your code no matter how hard you try.<\/p>\n
Having tortured my students with over 600 practice M\/C questions ( Moodle makes this sooooo easy ) and volumes of Free Response questions, I felt the need to blog a bit about the comments I heard after the exam ( more than 48 hours after the exam ).<\/p>\n
It never fails that after spending hours working to help students prepare that there will be handful of comments that upon hearing make you laugh and cry at the same time.\u00a0 I have embellished these just a bit to protect the innocent and to slightly increase the humor factor.<\/p>\n
These comments are in decreasing order of humor or pain \u2013 however you quantify them.
\nPlease do your best to infer the extreme level of sarcasm in my [anecdotal bracketed] mental responses.<\/p>\n
DISCLAIMER <\/strong>\u2013 All comments were heard 48 hours after the exam.<\/p>\n #5 \u2013 \u201cWe had to write programs all year long with Bug[], Dog[], Cat[], Alien[], Aardvark[], Chicken[], and Alligator[] arrays, but never any Horse[] arrays.\u201d #4 \u2013 \u201cWhat do you guys mean that you should always put private on instance variables?\u201d #3 \u2013 \u201cYou should never in your life override an act() method!\u201d #2\u00a0 –\u00a0 \u201cI made sure to return on all parts of the Free Response – even from the void methods!\u201d #1 –\u00a0 \u201cWe had to go through matrices over and over again and even had to count up all of the 5s in one matrix lab, but we never had to count up all of the 255s.\u201d
\n[ I clearly blew it on this one.\u00a0 How could I have not know to make a Horse[] array lab?\u00a0 Arrrgggh! \u00a0]<\/p>\n
\n[This is only to prevent other goofballs from destroying your data from afar \u2013 the danger is apparently much closer. ]<\/p>\n
\n[Yes, all classes have act methods that are sacred and free from that nasty process called overriding and the multitude of assignments we did where we overrode act were just figments of your imagination. ]<\/p>\n
\n[ My motto is if all else fails and are you are unsure what to do – just return. \u00a0Works almost every time. \u00a0Duh!]<\/p>\n
\n[Once again, I clearly blew it \u00a0\u2013 I was way off by a whopping 250!]<\/p>\n