At the beginning of November, for the first time in many years I attended the annual College Board Forum. Held this year in Washington, DC, the Forum is an opportunity for administrators and faculty from high schools and colleges to gather together with folks from College Board to discuss a wide range of issues in the world of college admissions, college preparation, financial accessibility, and standardized test-taking, among many other topics. College Board of course is the non-profit entity that has brought us the SAT and the Advanced Placement (AP) program and whose presence has been felt far and wide in the world of higher education.

 

I admit to holding a healthy amount of skepticism about College Board’s goals and practices over the years, as I think any of us in education should. The notion of “gatekeeping” tests like the SAT and ACT (run by a different company) always promotes lively discussion about fairness, equity, and the ways in which college admissions offices place stock in these sorts of “objective” measures.

 

Meanwhile, the AP program generates contradictory reactions at schools like Colorado Academy. While the courses (of which we offer between 13-16 APs in a given year) have solid content and hold students accountable to a rigorous curriculum and a measurable final outcome, we also want to be sure that our teachers never feel as if College Board, not CA itself, is driving curricular choices and setting standards of rigor that we would be better off setting ourselves. Obviously, at this point we are still comfortable with offering AP courses and do consider them among the most challenging we offer, but we also know our non-AP curriculum asks plenty of our students.

 

Our faculty and administration believe that we are not compromising our integrity by offering AP courses and buying in to a standardized, national program. But that is a discussion we re-visit on a regular basis.

 

The newest Advanced Placement offering, officially starting in the fall of 2016, is a course called Computer Science Principles. As ever, I approached this new course with a critical eye, but after attending a two-hour workshop at the Forum, I must say I am impressed with the progressive content and the boldness with which College Board is moving on this venture. In coordination with the National Science Foundation (NSF), the course has been in development for several years. A major part of their joint venture has been to reimagine what an introductory comp sci course should look like at the college level as well as in high school. At the same time, NSF and College Board have been eager to find ways to encourage more women and underrepresented minority groups into the field, as computer science has become an increasing bastion for white male academics.

 

At Colorado Academy, we will be offering this new AP course to juniors and seniors next year. Co-taught by our longtime computer science teacher Kimberly Jans and English teacher Tom Thorpe, the course will balance a certain amount of computer programming with in-depth discussions about the role technology plays in our everyday lives. The class will be less programming-intensive than the existing AP Computer Science, a course that CA has offered for many years. College Board notes that APCSP is “built around fundamentals of computing including problem solving, working with data, understanding the Internet, cybersecurity, and programming.” The method of assessment will also be much different in this course than in most AP’s: in addition to the traditional multiple-choice exam in May, students will be asked to complete two performance tasks over the course of the year, submitted to a panel of evaluators. These tasks will tackle real-world problems that can be solved, in part, by technological solutions, but which also must evaluate the impact of such solutions on people and/or the environment.

 

What is interesting in this case is that the progressive nature of this class actually outpaces what is being offered at most colleges and universities at this time. With a few strong exceptions, like a class at Cal-Berkeley called The Beauty and Joy of Computing, most colleges have not yet developed an interdisciplinary approach to this subject area. Thus, in the end, students who receive a high score on this AP exam may receive college credit and/or placement, but there may be fewer colleges and universities that will know what to do with that credit. That should change over time, as higher education keeps pace with Duke, Rutgers, Cal-Berkeley, and others that currently have freshman-level or introductory computer science classes that are similar to AP Computer Science Principles.

 

To College Board’s credit as well, the organization has partnered with a company called Code.org, which is responsible for the nationwide phenomenon of the “Hour of Code” that now occurs every December. (CA has participated every year so far and the results have been tremendous: students and teachers have been exposed to both the creative and academic side of coding, and this has prompted greater interest to take elective courses.) Hadi and Ali Partovi, two brothers with extensive computer science and entrepreneurial backgrounds, founded Code.org in 2013; their goal is to “expand access to computer science, and increase participation by women and underrepresented students of color.” They are convinced of the value of the field from both a problem solving and systems design standpoint and maintain that it should be a standard part of any school’s curriculum.

 

So it is an exciting time in computer science nationally and here at Colorado Academy. With an ever-expanding repertoire of courses, including a new AP course next year, CA is poised to be a leader in this field for years to come.