Barbara Ericson’s analysis of the 2019 Advanced Placement CS data
February 10, 2020 at 7:00 am 4 comments
Barb spoke at CornellTech’s “To Code and Beyond” workshop on January 10 on her analysis of the Advanced Placement CS data (both A and CS Principles). She’s shared the slides and her analysis at her blog.
As usual, the analyses are fascinating and dismal. It’s amazing to see how few people are really getting access to AP CS.
This year, she did a bunch of intersectional analyses which were eye opening. Here’s a couple of the results that I found surprising. Only 9 states had more than 10 Black Women pass the AP CS A exam. Only 14 states had more than 10 Hispanic Women pass the AP CSA exam. Those aren’t percentages — that’s a raw number of exam-takers who passed. AP CSP numbers are larger, but still disappointing.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized.
4 Comments Add your own
Leave a comment
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed
Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
1.
orcmid | February 10, 2020 at 10:23 am
It would be useful to see these normalized to percentages of all those passing in a state. I imagine the results would be even more dismal for the high-population states, although it does depend on how much there is preparation.
I suppose another demographic has to do with proportions of (college-prep?) students in those distinct states.
I am talking out of the top of my head, but the choice of statistics to present should give us more insight and recognition of how noisy this all is. I predict that the disparity of preparation and opportunity for college entry may swamp this CS-centric concern, and that’s very scary with regard to future caretakers of the planet and the US.
2.
Mark Guzdial | February 10, 2020 at 10:28 am
Please see Barbara’s blog post. She does normalization by population (both overall and in the given demographics) in the spreadsheets she creates and shares.
3.
orcmid | February 10, 2020 at 2:43 pm
Oh, thanks Mark. I didn’t catch the link on first reading. Yes, much more detail. I also see that there is good context in some of the call-outs on a diagram you posted.
4.
Mr. Chmielewski (@MrChmielewski) | February 17, 2020 at 10:01 am
Thanks for sharing! I’m new to AP but been teaching CS for a couple years. It’s interesting how my class in some ways is a microcosm of what’s already happening, but in other ways not.