Practice AP Exam?

Hello all,

Where can we find the practice exam released last year?

Are there any materials from Code.org for exam prep once all the units are complete?

Are the questions from last year’s AP exam available somewhere?

The practice exam and all exam related materials can be found on the College Board website. Please see the link below.

https://www.collegeboard.org

  1. Log into your account dashboard and click on the AP Course Audit link.
  2. Once your arrive on the Audit page,
  3. Select Secured Materials.
  4. Click on ComputerScience Principles

You may also consult the AP Computer Science Principles facebook group for more resources.

Like the original question, wondering if there are additional released materials (new questions, sample scoring, etc.) from the May 2017 exam. The material in AP Audit is useful but was the original 2016 I already have.
Thanks,

@sbishov

For written exam, the CED (purple book) has sample questions and teachers who have completed the audit can access the only released practice exam (same from last year). Due to the newness of the exam, there isn’t a deep well of sample multiple choice questions to provide students.

For the PTs, the updated scoring guides and student exemplars are available on the CB’s website for the exam. There are also links to these materials in the exam prep ‘units’ plus some really great support materials.

Explore PT: https://curriculum.code.org/csp/csp-explore/
Create PT: https://curriculum.code.org/csp/csp-create/

Hope this helps,
Andrea

Hello,
I too am very new to code.org. from the above post it appears that as a teacher, I need to create a college board account of my own to access the practice exam. Is this correct?

Correct! If you are offering the course as an AP, you need to submit the audit which, once approved will get you access to a released multiple choice exam. Then you should be good to go!

If you need directions to submit the audit just head to this link. It goes step-by-step. For some other AP courses, the audit process can be daunting, but with code.org, they did all the hardest work for you in terms of the audit - you just need to let the college board know you are using their materials.

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Hi all,

Quick question about the practice exams posted on the collegeboard website. I would like to administer these practice exams without printing so much paper ( thousands of copies) and post the pdf online for students to answer on the paper. Problem is that I need to hide somehow the answers page from the booklets. Any suggestions on that?

I wonder if collegeboard would provide the password for unlocking the secure pdfs.
Thanks

You are not allowed to publish these tests online. If college board finds out they will ask you to bring it down. Some teachers use them for actual end of year assessments. So please don’t make make them publicly available.

Thanks for your reply.

We all know that ‘publishing’ online can also be done privately ( I could do this on my server) where students need a password or be a member of my classroom ( using google apps) to access them.

Does any of these sound like a good option compared to printing 1840 pages for the two tests for all my 24 students ( not including the teacher time to organize and staple the materials) ?

Yeah, just wanted to mention that ‘public’ bit. Sounds like good options. You could print the pages you want students to see to a pdf. So technically don’t print the answer page.

So other than asking you to take them down, no other repercussions? Thanks!

That’s really a question for the College Board. I haven’t heard of any other repercussions, but they would be able to answer that best.

I administered the practice exam and graded my student’s the explore and create tasks. I was able to calculate a weighted average of the 3 grades. My question is, how do I map those scores to the equivalent grade (5, 4, 3, 2, 1) ?

Hi @akohart,

Short answer is there’s no definite way. From what I understand, the cutoffs are based on multiple factors, not just straight weights and percentages. Some other factors might include student performance relative to each other (basically, “curving”) and input from teachers (surveys were sent out last year asking teachers what they thought should be cutoffs for certain performance task sections… not sure to what extent those were incorporated).

Probably the only reference point you might be able to use is the score distributions, found here: https://apscore.collegeboard.org/scores/about-ap-scores/score-distributions//
You could simply have your students’ scores drop into those distributions, but that would be making a lot of assumptions. :slight_smile:

Frank

So if we do print these for student, or print portions would students NOT be allowed to take it home? Or can we give them a printed or digital copy to take home?

Here is the agreement you have with the College Board using their practice tests.

“I understand that AP Practice Exams are for in-classroom use only. To ensure their integrity, I will keep them in a secure location, will not assign them as take-home assignments, will collect them back from my students after administering them in class, and will NOT post them on school or other websites. I am aware that I may incorporate questions from the AP Practice Exam into shorter assessments that I create, so long as my assessments are paper-based, my assessments are administered in my classroom, and I collect the test questions from the students upon completion of the testing period. I understand that any additional distribution of the AP Practice Exam violates the College Board’s copyright policies and may result in the termination of exam access for my school as well as access to other online services, such as the AP Teacher Community and Online Score Reports.”

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Thanks for clarifying. I believed this to be the case, but could not find this definitive statement. Just out of interest where is this statement located?

Okay, so my students were taking the practice test on Khan Academy for the APCSP exam and they ran across a question about array’s and on the AP reference sheet it states lists start at 1. However, in the lessons in Code.org and other places, lists/arrays all start at position 0. Can someone help clarify this? I don’t want my students to get this question wrong.

Different programming languages have a different index for the first element of the array. Javascript, Java, etc start the index at 0. However, languages like Scratch start at 1. The Pseuodcode used on the AP Exam starts the array index at 1. I remind my students of this distinction several times especially before a test.

I did not realize it until one of my students mentioned it today. I immediately commented on it to all my classes through google classroom. So hopefully now, they will all know the difference.