Archive for November 27, 2015

How many schools will honor the AP CSP attestation?

My Blog@CACM post this month is A Call to Action for Higher Education to make AP CS Principles Work. The Advanced Placement course on CS Principles becomes “real” this Fall 2016, and the first offering of the exam will be Spring 2017.  I expect that we in academic CS departments in the United States will soon be getting phone calls, “If we offer AP CSP and our students pass the exam, what will it count for at your school?”

When I talk to people who have worked on CSP about this issue, the question I get back in response is, “But there’s the attestation!”  Over 80 schools supported creation of the AP CS Principles course — see the list here.  The wording of the attestation varied by school, but makes these five points (taken from Larry Snyder’s page):

  1. It’s a substantive, important project — keep up the good work!
  2. We intend to give successful students credit at our school
  3. We intend to offer a comparable, content-rich course
  4. We intend to give successful students placement in a sequent course at our school
  5. [Optional] We are willing to have our school listed as supporting AP CS Principle

I don’t know.  My school currently has no plans for #2, 3, or 4, but we did sign the attestation.  (I’m working on coming up with a plan at Georgia Tech, but am not getting much traction.)  I don’t know about the status at other schools that signed the attestation.  I expect that Duke and Berkeley are going to follow-through, since they have done #3.  Some schools don’t give any or much credit for AP, so #2 may be out of the CS departments hands. I don’t know if there’s any legal requirement to follow through on the attestation.

November 27, 2015 at 8:13 am 14 comments


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