<p>So i just took my ap comp sci final and it was like nothing we ever had before. The highest grade in the class was a 84%. And the person who got this 84% is planning on dropping out of high school and free lancing for programming. Hes really good, but that just depicts the difficulty of the final. This grade dropped me from an A to a B, and unfortunately, since its winter break i can only email my comp sci teacher instead of talking to him face to face. How should i approach him to ask if he might be able to raise my grade? Thanks.</p>
<p>Oh well it’s a B.</p>
<p>You got the grade you got. Grade grubbing is not a good activity.</p>
<p>Eh, and your reasoning behind why you and you alone should have your grade raised is…?</p>
<p>Yes, you’re teacher’s kind of a jerk for not curving that exam, but you’re stuck with that grade unless the teacher decides to add points to everyone else’s exam scores. If you email him about your grade, ask him to curve to the exam. Nothing else you can really ask for.</p>
<p>i guess but for this year for some reason in all of my ap classes there was only about 0-1 A’s out of a solid class of 40 and this teacher just seems like the easiest to approach out of them</p>
<p>sorry i forgot to include that he did in fact curve the final but the highest was an 84% then every else was below like 50% so he professional programming student kind f screwed the class over</p>
<p>Aw, that sucks. Damn curve destroyers.</p>
<p>Argue that he should remove outliers before curving the class, as they completely detract from the point of curving an exam in the first place.</p>
<p>In what way was it difficult? The subject material, even for the AB exam, was really easy I thought. Did he make you find mistakes in ridiculously convoluted methods or something? Cause the actual AP exam was also really straightforward, so if you know the material and it’s just your teacher messing with you, you’ll be fine.</p>
<p>well for all the previous years he just made the class write a program, but since grades were due like 3 hours after the exam he had to use a scantron so he found the most difficult 20 ap comp sci questions over the past decade to give us and he told us the test was extremely difficult. </p>
<p>Like since its first semester we didnt cover all the topic but a question was like this. There was a full page of code with arraylists and inheritance with other parent classes with about 4 embedded for loops a lot of counter variables and methods. We had to find the error with the code or if it would run fine.</p>
<p>That’s not that hard.</p>
<p>That’s how my tests are.</p>
<p>I hope that curve destroyer knows that more money exists higher up in the CS analysts jobs… unless he’s working for some wealthy benefactors.</p>
<p>What were the questions?</p>
<p>uhmm this is a rough explanation but one of them was like this</p>
<p>-1 page of code of just a method, but it was a child class and had other parent classes it extended too
-a 2 dimensional array was called through the method, it gave us the array which had names in it about 6 by 6
- the method basically scrambled the letters and we had to find the output
- 4 imbedded loops with if and if else statements, like 6 counters, he confused us with braces and indentations to make it even harder
- .substring, .indexOf, and .equals() was pretty rampant throughout the method</p>
<p>So basically we had to find the output of this method if this certain 2 dimension array was ran through it. And keep in mind this is 1st semester so we have not been introduced to many other concepts.</p>
<p>The barons was like a joke compared to this.</p>
<p>No offense… but if this a 1st semester thing… that’s relatively slow.</p>
<p>It couldn’t have been that rough. The honors comp sci class does this in their sleep.</p>
<p>^ r u serious? maybe im just not describing it correctly but i high doubt any honors class cud do it since all our prospective ivy league kids and some EA kids to stanford and upenn failed</p>
<p>I wouldn’t lie. We covered this last year… and now we’re getting the more computer systems stuff. </p>
<p>My midterm last year was like that.</p>
<p>Ehh…I’m gonna have to side with MIT on this one. That does not sound like a final that should stump that many students. Not only can you generally figure out the purpose of a loop - or how it functions in the long run - after running the loop 3-4 times, but it deals with arrays…which is simply drawing a mental picture. </p>
<p>AP CS code is pretty linear during the first semester. You’re going to have to get used to being able to read and understand how classes/methods function for the AP test (Gridworld).</p>
<p>AP CS:Coding intensive.</p>
<p>My IB CS class: On my last programming assignment though we can code in countless amounts of things.</p>
<p>
What exactly do you mean?</p>
<p>If I read right… I think he/she means that they used an uncommon style in displaying the code.</p>
<p>^ Yeah, that’d be a dick move.</p>
<p>Hm, I can see there being problems with a 2D array, seeing as I don’t think CS A is introduced to multidimensional arrays in the first semester, if at all (though when you learn it, you’ll find it’s not all that different from a 1D array, as it’s just an array within an array). </p>
<p>Scrambling letters and finding the output is pretty easy. In fact, I would say there’s a very very high chance of seeing it on the MC section of the AP exam, as it deals with the fundamental skill of following variable changes through the code. </p>
<p>Embedded loops (especially while-for-if-else) are something you should expect on the exam. It’s another example of just following through the code’s logic and understanding how a variable changes as it goes through the code.</p>
<p>.substring, .indexOf, and .equals() are not only fair game, they’re very prevalent (especially when dealing with inputs and arrays. In fact, I don’t think I’ve written one legitimate program in which I didn’t use all three of these methods at least once. Very very important, and they’re very easy to understand.</p>
<p>I’m not sure how far you’ve gotten with these topics though, or how difficult the actual questions were (the concepts are straightforward enough), so it’s possible your teacher did kind of screw you over.</p>
<p>^ My comp sci teacher did it all the time.</p>
<p>It was horrible.</p>
<p>In my class… we basically went to loops during the conditionals. </p>
<p>String unit was fundamental.</p>
<p>yea me and some other kids are trying to contact the teacher about grades, and also all of our tests so far were just writing programs… so this was the first MC test we had were we actually had to read code</p>