Good luck to all on the upcoming AP CS A Exam!<\/p>\n
As I have taught the course for nearly twenty years and spent many years studying exam trends as a grading reader, a grading leader, and consultant, I am aware of the main topics to cover, but I really focused heavily on four main areas with my students in prep for this year’s Free Response section.<\/p>\n
1.\u00a0 ArrayList of Classes \/ References –\u00a0 there is always a question that requires students to work with an ArrayList<NeverSeenThisClassBefore> that involves lots of drilling down to get to the various pieces.\u00a0 You must be comfortable with abstraction to handle this type of question.\u00a0 Working with GridWorld helps!\u00a0 Working with lists of integers and doubles will not be enough.\u00a0 Go all of the way back to 2006 and you can see where this whole question thread started.<\/p>\n
2.\u00a0 Make a Class from scratch – you may have to implement an interface or extend an abstract class, but probably not.\u00a0 That type of question went away about 5 years ago.\u00a0 More than likely, the students will have to extend Bug or Critter to make a new class that will involve method overriding and such.\u00a0 Pretty simple, but requires some practice.\u00a0 You could get an APLine question, but most likely, it will be a GridWorld question.<\/p>\n
3.\u00a0 Processing an Array – this could be an array of classes like last years Horse[] question, but who knows.\u00a0 2012 was the first year the AP exam had an array of classes \/ references.\u00a0 Most of the time the array question just involves some algorithmic stuff with numbers like finding smallest, largest, difference between smallest and largest, etc.<\/p>\n
4.\u00a0 Matrices – matrices are back and boy am I glad.\u00a0 I love the matrix – what a great movie!\u00a0 Last year was the hardest matrix question in the world – you had to count 255s!\u00a0 This year will probably be more like the route cipher from 2011.\u00a0 I have prepped my students on Matrix[SomeClassFromMars][SomeClassFromMars] as I assume that a matrix of classes would throw a serious curve ball at most students.\u00a0 I also did some work with transposition ciphers as I really like ciphers.<\/p>\n
I will post comments after I see the actual Free Response questions next week and let you know if I was close or not even in the ballpark.\u00a0 I have been very accurate with my predictions in the past.<\/p>\n
If you want to see slides I have used as AP Exam review slides<\/a> in the past, I have some of those posted that you can download.<\/p>\n