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Programming

The Toughest Programming Question for High School Students on This Year's CS Exam: Arrays 65

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%

Comment Re:'murica proving to the rest of the world (Score 1) 118

Transactional doesn't mean anything without consistency. To my mind the worst damage this administration is doing is to themselves in the longer term. What's the point of making any concessions for a deal at all if it will just not honor it? By defanging any oversight, and make itself its own enforcer, other parties really have no foundation upon which to assume that negotiated terms mean anything at all..

Comment Re:Google (Score 3, Insightful) 7

So do it yourself. Honestly, this kind of kneejerk response is stupid. Is Google a good company? No. Does that mean everything they do is useless/untrustworthy? Also no.

You can fetch OSS Rebuild's SLSA Provenance:

$ oss-rebuild get cratesio syn 2.0.39

or explore the rebuilt versions of a particular package:

$ oss-rebuild list pypi absl-py

or even rebuild the package for yourself:

$ oss-rebuild get npm lodash 4.17.20 --format=dockerfile | docker run $(docker buildx build -q -)

Comment Re: Dystopia this isn't (Score 1) 78

"destroyed by their reaction of hiding"

My point was exactly that while we think we have all the context we need, we sometimes don't, to potentially devastating effect. The fact that the internet brigade has a high chance of being "right" in this case doesn't invalidate the point. People can have perfectly legitimate reasons to not want the details of who they're in a relationship with broadcast at large.

All you post tells me is that people are very hungry to see people "get what they deserve" and extrapolate all sorts of things to make them feel justified about doing so.

Comment Re:Dystopia this isn't (Score 1) 78

I think in broad strokes, infidelity is bad, but when it comes to a specific case, I'd say nobody is in a position to judge without much more context.

And that's what makes this kind of stuff rather shitty. People feel confident filling in all sorts of details from their own imagination and prejudices, and even if you get it mostly right 9 times out of 10 (to be very charitable, in my opinion) does that excuse the 10% of the time where the internet mob is wrong?

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