Barbara Ericson’s 2015 AP CS demographics analysis: Still No African-Americans Taking the AP CS Exam in 9 States

Normally, this is the time of the year when Barb writes her guest post about the AP CS exam-taker demographics.  She did the analysis, and you can get the overview at this web page and the demographics details at this web page.

But before we got a chance to put together a blog post, Liana Heitin of EdWeek called her for an interview.  They did a nice job summarizing the results (including interactive graphs) at the article linked below.

Some of the more interesting points (from Liana’s article):

No girls took the exam in Mississippi, Montana, or Wyoming. (Though Montana had no test-takers at all, male included, this year. Wyoming, which previously had no students take the test, had three boys take the exam in 2015).

Hawaii had the largest percentage of female test-takers, with 33 percent.

The overall female pass rate went up 3 percentage points, to 61 percent, from the year before.

Twenty-four girls took the test in Iowa, and 100 percent of them passed.”You don’t usually see 100 percent passing with numbers that big,” said Ericson. “Maybe five out of five pass. But 24 out of 24 is pretty cool.”

No African-American students took the exam in nine states: Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. That’s better than last year, though, when 13 states had no African-American test-takers.

Notably, Mississippi has the highest population of African-Americans—about half of the state’s high school graduates last year were black, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Yet of the five AP computer science test-takers, all were white or Asian and male.

Source: Still No African-Americans Taking the AP Computer Science Exam in Nine States – Curriculum Matters – Education Week