Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Don't like the data? (Score 2) 78

...then fire and/or burn it.

That's what dictators do. Nobody trusts China's and Russia's official econ stats because the books are always cooked to make the dictator look like the best dictator ever, believe me, everyone says so.

There can't be climate change if there is no instrument around to measure it.

Comment Dinosaurs should have swallowed AI after blast (Score 0) 16

Napster's latest AI pivot "is the latest in a series of attempts...to ride its brand cachet

Every dying brand shoves AI into their product/service as a last ditch effort to attract gullible investors. "DependsGTP* now keeps you dryer using AI with SmartSorb[tm]".

* Letter switcheroo is intentional, I'll let you figure why

Programming

The Toughest Programming Question for High School Students on This Year's CS Exam: Arrays 63

America's nonprofit College Board lets high school students take college-level classes — including a computer programming course that culminates with a 90-minute test. But students did better on questions about If-Then statements than they did on questions about arrays, according to the head of the program. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp explains: Students exhibited "strong performance on primitive types, Boolean expressions, and If statements; 44% of students earned 7-8 of these 8 points," says program head Trevor Packard. But students were challenged by "questions on Arrays, ArrayLists, and 2D Arrays; 17% of students earned 11-12 of these 12 points."

"The most challenging AP Computer Science A free-response question was #4, the 2D array number puzzle; 19% of students earned 8-9 of the 9 points possible."

You can see that question here. ("You will write the constructor and one method of the SumOrSameGame class... Array elements are initialized with random integers between 1 and 9, inclusive, each with an equal chance of being assigned to each element of puzzle...") Although to be fair, it was the last question on the test — appearing on page 16 — so maybe some students just didn't get to it.

theodp shares a sample Java solution and one in Excel VBA solution (which includes a visual presentation).

There's tests in 38 subjects — but CS and Statistics are the subjects where the highest number of students earned the test's lowest-possible score (1 out of 5). That end of the graph also includes notoriously difficult subjects like Latin, Japanese Language, and Physics.

There's also a table showing scores for the last 23 years, with fewer than 67% of students achieving a passing grade (3+) for the first 11 years. But in 2013 and 2017, more than 67% of students achieved that passsing grade, and the percentage has stayed above that line ever since (except for 2021), vascillating between 67% and 70.4%.

2018: 67.8%
2019: 69.6%
2020: 70.4%
2021: 65.1%
2022: 67.6%
2023: 68.0%
2024: 67.2%
2025: 67.0%

Slashdot Top Deals

New systems generate new problems.

Working...