This was posted on a Facebook group for AP exam readers of this past summer (For anyone interested in contributing to and accessing a crowd-sourced question bank):
For AP CSP Teachers looking for high-quality sample multiple-choice questions, I have some good news and some bad news.
The good news, of course, is that the College Board has announced that a question bank of just such questions will be available in 2019.
The bad news, of course, is that 2017 and 2018 come before 2019.
You may recall that I made an announcement at the end of the reading about crowd-sourcing a question bank. Approximately 50 of the readers from the 2017 AP CSP exam have banded together to create a Readers Question Bank. Overseen by a six-person executive council, this group will be making this resource available for free under a creative commons attribution license to all interested AP CSP teachers. They will be available enough in advance of the AP exam to be a useful resource for review. We have refined a fairly sophisticated process of question creation, tracking, and review in order to create a balanced distribution of high-quality AP-style questions. I have attached a sample to give you a sense of the questions. We anticipate having roughly 300 questions available by early spring.
Now that we have a reasonable process in place, I am reaching out to other readers to consider participating. One of the benefits of being a question creator is preferentially early access to the question bank, allowing you use of the questions in your quizzes and unit tests throughout the year.
If you are interested please send a note to scottstornetta@gmail.com. Please include Readers Question Bank in the subject line.
Thanks for your interest, and look forward to providing you with a great resource,
W. Scott Stornetta, Ph.D.
Readers Question Bank Executive Council
p.s.: Finally, I should clarify that the Readers Question Bank is strictly a grass-roots effort, and we claim no official affiliation with or endorsement from the College Board.
I guess the best way right now would be to contact scottstornetta@gmail.com and ask if you can still contribute and get early access to the question bank.
FWIW I’ve been in touch with Scott about how Code.org can help/contribute/support this effort. All that means for now @bbinkley is that once the bank is active/produced we’ll know about it and do a broadcast communication – so, you’ll know.
You need to know markdown, but you can load examples to see how they work.
One of the underlying goals of the tool is to propose a data model for capturing AP questions for Scott’s question bank project (see the JSON area below the creation dialogs).
Thus, contributors should have a tool that makes it easy to compose questions, get them laid out properly, and produce the appropriate data to submit.
As you already know and from what I have learned over the past year, code.org curriculum is an A+.
Activities…check
Widgets…check
Collaboration and engagement…check
ABC and CBV…check
Practice Performance Tasks…check
Readings…check
code.studio programming environment as you hold everyone’s hand (built is grading as well)…check
and several other features.
However, the one area where we all fall a little short…more AP style assessment questions. I know it’s hard and it takes lots of time to create these questions. I wish I could wiggle my nose and bring a exhaustive test bank to life which is also secure for all CSP teachers.
Sorry I don’t have the time to contribute creating assessments questions. I am only hoping a 3rd party or code.org improves the assessment branch soon.
BTW, when is the Brook and Baker podcast coming back?
Personal side note and many thanks to code.org curriculum…ALL 73 of my students last year passed the AP Exam. Score of 3=42.5%: Score of 4: 35.6%: Score of 5: 20.5%. Well above the national average thanks to your entire TEAM. Many thanks!
WHOA!!! Way to go @jkeays that is fantastic - nice work!!! I hear you on the assessment questions though - I too am playing that game of waiting until Barrons comes out with something…
Months ago when I reached out to Barron’s, they were well aware of the new AP course but had no solified plans of a prep book release. Considering over 29,000 students took the exam in year 1, I think that would be a good enough reason for them to work on something soon.
Yeah, we’re well aware of the assessment gap in the course and I’ve been dying to do something about it. It’s been hard to commit to an overhaul until we had any insight into the actual exam itself and PTs. Now we do. It will be a slow grind, and a major undertaking, but it’s probably our top priority. There’s some engineering issues on our side too that we’re hoping to address. Suffice it to say our platform was not designed for assessments, and what we currently do involves a lot of shoehorning that is not ideal – this is an issue for us K-12 not just CSP.
Scott Stornetta’s group I suspect is going to make great progress as well. The fact is we just need 10x the material in the assessment ecosystem for CSP than we have now. So I’m hoping we can support parallel efforts and give teachers better choice and greater agency.