5 Steps to a 5: AP Computer Science Principles 2024 - Sway J.S. 2023

4 Strategies to Help You Do Your Best on the Exam and Create Performance Task
STEP 3 Develop Strategies for Success

IN THIS CHAPTER

Summary: This chapter contains strategies and tips for answering the multiple-choice questions of the AP Computer Science Principles exam. You’ll also find strategies to approach and master the performance task. Understanding how to most effectively and efficiently take the test and prepare the Create Performance Task (CPT) will help you get a higher score.

Key Ideas

Practice pacing yourself on the multiple-choice exam. Don’t get bogged down on questions you don’t understand. Your goal is to get to the end of the exam so you get every point possible for the questions you know.

If you don’t know an answer on the multiple-choice exam, use the process of elimination to eliminate one or more answer choices and then guess. Don’t leave any questions blank. There is no penalty for wrong answers!

Planning, collaborating where allowed, and carefully editing your written response to conform to the scoring rubric are keys to doing well on the performance task.

Strategies and Tips for the Multiple-Choice Exam

It’s safe to say that this will not be the first timed multiple-choice exam you’ve ever taken. You’re familiar with how this works and have probably already developed your own style to approach this type of test. To get the highest score you are capable of, it’s necessary that your method is as efficient and effective as possible. Look at the strategies below and make sure you’re on the right track.

Strategy #1: Pace Yourself

Many students approach the test with the lofty goal of getting every answer correct. But this approach will get you bogged down in the difficult questions where you are not sure of the answer. You’ll end up not completing the test and missing questions you could easily have gotten right. Keep in mind that you can miss a number of multiple-choice questions and still get a 5. The best strategy in approaching the test is not to worry about missing some questions; instead try to make sure you get to every question for which you know the answer.

The AP Computer Science Principles exam does not start out with easy questions and work its way up to the hard ones. Questions are randomly ordered so the questions that are easy for you are just as likely to be at the end as at the beginning of the test. Remember: you get the same number of points for getting an easy question right as a hard question. Don’t bring down your score by not getting to all the questions to which you know the answer. If you don’t know an answer, take a guess and move on. You need to get to the last question of the exam in order to maximize the number of questions you answer correctly.

Practice pacing yourself by taking the practice tests in this book and timing yourself. You have to answer 70 questions in two hours. So, you need to answer 35 questions per hour, or 17 to 18 every half hour. That’s about a minute and 43 seconds per question. Keep track of your pace as you work. Ideally, you’ll want to work a little faster so that at the end you have time to go back to questions you want to think more about (more about that in the next section).

The difficult questions are not the only ones that may slow you down. Don’t spend time second-guessing a choice you made. This is usually a waste of valuable time. Trust your initial instincts and don’t change an answer unless you are certain it needs changing.

Strategy #2: Use the Process of Elimination and Guess

You’re probably familiar with this strategy from all the timed multiple-choice exams you’ve taken. The correct answer is right in front of you. If you don’t know which one it is, immediately start eliminating answer choices you’re pretty sure are wrong. If you can eliminate even one choice as incorrect, your odds of getting the question right improve. If you can eliminate two wrong answer choices, you have a good chance of guessing correctly between the two remaining choices.

Even if you can’t eliminate a single wrong answer choice, you should still guess. There is no penalty for guessing incorrectly, so make sure an oval is filled in for every question.

Mark questions you want to come back to at the end if you have time. Perhaps another question will jog your memory or even offer a clue. You should try to work fast enough so that you have a little time at the end to do this. But be sure to mark the question in your test booklet, not on your answer sheet. Keep all unnecessary pencil marks off your answer sheet so that the computer that scores the test doesn’t misread your marks.

Even if it’s a question you want to come back to, fill in an answer choice. Don’t leave it blank. You may not have time to come back. Also, marking an oval will reduce the chance that you’ll mess up your answer sheet. Your worst nightmare is answering the questions correctly but getting off a row in filling in the ovals.

The process of elimination is even more powerful when used for the eight final multiple-choice questions for which you’ll need to select two correct answers. Fill in two ovals for each of these questions. If you can eliminate just two wrong answers, you’ll get the question right. But keep in mind that there’s no partial credit; to get the question right, you’ll need to have identified both correct answers.

Helpful Tips for the Multiple-Choice Exam

Reading the Question

• Read each question all the way through. Don’t guess what the final question or instruction is. Note that the instruction to choose two answer choices is given at the end.

• Watch for words like not, never, least, most, and always. Be especially careful in selecting an answer when one of these negative words appears.

• Think of your answer before reading the choices. This can save you time and keep any distractors from making you second-guess your response.

• Read all the answer choices. Do NOT stop at the first choice you think is correct. There may be a better answer further down the choices.

• If the answer choices are not what you would expect, it’s possible you misread or misunderstood the question. Read the question again and again until you understand what it is asking.

Choosing an Answer

• Guess if you do not know the answer. There is no penalty for wrong answers.

• Mark questions you want to come back to if you have time at the end. Mark them in the question booklet, not the answer sheet, where any stray pencil mark may be misread by the computer.

• Do NOT change an answer unless you are certain. Trust your initial instincts.

• Do NOT change an answer because you see there are several answers of the same letter in a row! Don’t worry if you seem to be marking a lot of one letter in your answer choices.

Marking the Answer Sheet

• Fill in the bubbles on the answer sheet completely. But don’t make other marks on your answer sheet.

• If you need to erase an answer, make sure it’s completely erased so that the computer won’t read that you filled in two ovals. Bring an eraser that won’t leave smudges.

• Be sure you are filling in the answer for the correct question. Check each time you turn the page to be sure. There’s nothing worse than getting the question right but putting the answer in the wrong row.

Strategies for the Performance Task

In this chapter, you’ll find strategies that will give you a plan of attack for the performance task. In the next chapter (Chapter 5), you’ll find a more specific step-by-step guide to the performance task. In Chapter 5, you’ll find numerous tips relating to specific parts of the performance task as well as a number of pitfalls to avoid. These tips won’t be repeated here; instead, this chapter focuses on broad strategies relating to how to plan for and carry out the performance task.

Strategy #1: Plan Your Project Before You Begin

Before the performance task officially begins with the required in-class time allocated to the project, be sure you think through what you will do. Your teacher has more leeway in answering questions before the project officially begins. You can ask questions about possible Create projects and get general advice. Your teacher may have your class do a practice Create project prior to the one that you will submit to the College Board. Take advantage of this to fully understand the performance task expectations. Practicing and planning before you officially begin the performance task is key to doing well.

The Create performance task requires you to develop a computer program, submit a video of the program running, and answer questions about the program you created. You should begin this task only after you have a good understanding of data abstraction and procedural abstraction, algorithms, and programming selection and iterative statements (loops), along with procedures and lists since all of these topics will be incorporated in your program and the written response.

You should choose a topic and think it through before your AP class begins the 12 official hours of class time required for the Create performance task. Be sure your programming topic is broad enough to be able to meet the criteria but not too broad so you cannot finish it on time. Before the task officially begins, you can plan what you want to do, collaborate with classmates, and ask your teacher questions about the topic or your planned methodology. But once the 12-hour time period begins, your teacher is more limited in what help can be given. After the project officially begins your teacher can only answer questions relating to the performance task in general. However, don’t hesitate to ask any question you have; your teacher will decide if the question can be answered wholly, in part, or not at all.

Strategy #2: Collaborate with a Classmate

The AP Computer Science Principles assessment is unique among AP exams in that it allows you to work with another student in your class. Take advantage of this and make it part of your strategy. Creating a computer program is the central requirement for the Create performance task. Programming is almost always better if people work together on it.

Keep in mind, though, that the collaboration allowed is limited to the programming that needs to be created for the Create performance task. Each of you will need to write sections of code independently, create your own video of the program running, and work on your own to complete the written responses.

Well before the 12-hour time period in your AP class for the Create performance task, you should try to line up a partner with whom you work well. You should talk about what type of program you want to create and plan what each of you will do. Make sure you are both on the same page with all of this before you officially begin to work together during the 12-hour in-class period. Also, be sure to plan enough time to get the individual parts you each wrote integrated into the project and tested as a whole.

Don’t worry if you are unable to line up a partner or simply prefer to work alone. Collaboration is not required.

Strategy #3: Evaluate and Then Edit Your Written Responses

While the AP Computer Science Principles exam is unique in that you’ll find no free-response questions on the exam on test day (just multiple-choice questions), the testmakers have made up for this by including a number of free-response questions for the Create performance task. How you do on the written responses will determine most of your score on the performance task. Be sure to leave enough time to write the written response. You can have an amazing programming project, but if you do not write adequately about it, you will not receive all of the available points for it.

A key to getting a high score on the performance task is to carefully edit your written response. The next chapter contains a step-by-step guide to answering the written response prompts. As you will discover, there are strict limits on the number of words you can use for each of the free-response questions. So, first you’ll need to edit your written responses to make sure they fall within the word-count limit for each question. But to really improve your score, you’ll have to take the editing one step further: you’ll have to evaluate your answers based on the scoring rubric the College Board has provided and then edit your responses to pick up any points you’ve missed.

The College Board has made public the rubric used to grade the written responses to the prompts. This rubric, which is still the current version, is included in the College Board’s PDF document AP Computer Science Principles 2022 Scoring Guidelines. If you haven’t already printed or bookmarked this document, you can find it at this link:

https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap22-sg-computer-science-principles.pdf

This scoring rubric is complex but very specific on how points are awarded. Think of it as an “answer sheet” and use it to evaluate each of your written responses. By applying the “answer sheet” to your written responses, you can discover how many points each response would earn. More importantly, you can find out exactly what you need to add to your written response to earn any points you’ve missed. Edit your responses to pick up these points, being sure to remain within the word-count limit for each question.

The site also has helpful information in the form of samples of actual student responses for the Create performance task. These examples are followed by a discussion of how points were awarded based on the rubric. You can follow these examples in evaluating your own written responses. These examples with scoring explanations can be found at the bottom of this web page:

https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-science-principles/exam

The student projects are in the left-most column labeled Create — Sample Responses. The middle column labeled Scoring Guidelines links directly to the Create performance task rubric. The right-hand column labeled Commentary has a document that explains whether points were earned based on the rubric and why or why not. The commentary for all of the sample projects is contained in the document.

Of course, evaluating your written responses based on the rubric and then editing your responses to match the rubric will take more time. You may not have time to complete this during the official 12-hour in-class time allocation. But there is no reason you can’t continue working on this at home or after the official minimum time period is over. You are permitted to spend more time outside of class to complete this task. The higher score you receive will be well worth the extra time you put in.

Now you are armed with the strategies that will help you attack and master the AP Computer Science Principles assessment. The next chapter focuses on the specifics of the Create performance task.