The AP (advanced placement) program provided by the college board offers opportunities to students to take college level classes in high school and show their mastery in advanced concepts and potentially earn college credit. The AP CS A exam allows students to show their knowledge in the fundamentals of object oriented programming and coding in java. I’ll talk to you about my experience preparing for and taking the AP CS A exam.
I took the AP CS A exam during the 2020-2021 school year (the year of distance learning). This was also my first year taking AP tests being in my sophomore year. The College board was uncertain about physical testing until January when they finally decided to make the AP tests virtual. My experience was very different compared to that of a student preparing and taking an AP exam in a on-school situation. I will share my thoughts from the perspective of a student taking the exam through self study.
The test essentially requires knowledge in skills fundamental to being a good programmer. There are two sections on the test, the multiple choice questions and the written questions. The multiple choice questions will be about topics such as being given a for/if/while loop in java, mark the result. You will also be asked to analyze java syntax and find mistakes. The written part of the test will give you a prompt about extending a java class’s implementation or ask you to write your own java class or methods with a certain goal in mind.
Preparing for the AP Exam
The AP CS A exam is very focused on the topics it covers and goes extremely in depth. The AP CS A exam expects fundamental understandings about object oriented programming, coding in java and algorithmic thinking and understanding. A good starting point in your preparation would be to start learning object oriented programming and java. I would recommend the udemy course: Decoding AP Computer Science A by Moksh Jawa. This course serves as an introduction to what the AP CS A exam will be like and some of the contents covered in it. The second resource I would recommend is Barron's book for the AP CS A exam. Barrons is a reputable publisher with many books that help prepare for this and many other AP Exams. Once finishing the previous course, I would recommend you take the practice assessment in Barron's book to see what you understand and what you don’t. Spend time going through all the chapters, writing notes and taking the chapter tests. One revelation I had is that the AP CS A exam and the book are quite different in their approach to tests. Barron’s focuses more on java, while the multiple choice part of the AP test focuses more on logic and analysis. Make sure you get good at analyzing logical questions and analyzing programs very quickly.
Taking the AP Exam
The AP Exam for CS A is 3 hours long. The first 1.5 hours is spent on the multiple choice questions and the other half is focused on writing programs. The MCQ portion of the test has 40 questions meaning you should spend roughly 2.25 minutes per question. This goes by very quickly so make sure you don’t spend too much time fixating on a certain problem. Go through the test answering all the questions you can then come back to the ones you struggle with. The second half of the exam will test your ability to write an actual java program. You will be given a prompt related to some logical analysis. You will then be given 2-3 sub questions and write programs for each one. There will be 4 such total questions so like the MCQ, you cannot waste time on something you do not know.
I hoped reading this gave you a little insight into taking and preparing for the AP CS A exam. Good luck in your preparation and on your test.
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