AP Compsci Test

So it's college season and my sister is a senior. I've seen her spend hours on this blog called College Confidential where all kinds of people discuss the minutea of getting into competitive colleges. Interestingly enough, people always list what APs  they have taken and what scores they got. Yet, of all the entries I've read, no one lists AP comp sci. Seriously, everyone lists chemistry and APUSH, but no-one lists APCOMPSCI. Maybe this is because very few people do well on the APCOMPSCI. I mean, from hearing all of the people in our class talk, none of them got 5's. I will study for the compsci ap. However, I won't spend an inordinate amount of time memorizing the tiny details that go with the ap test. My goal is to get a 3 just to prove to myself that I can. Hopefully, I will go to a college that is so good I won't be able to use the ap test for credit even if I wanted to. (I know that MIT makes you take their programming course even if you got a 5 on the AP).

Week in Review and Weekend

To sum up the week - I reviewed material for the Java AP test. That's all. I signed up for the test.

This weekend I went to New York City for a quizbowl tournament at Hunter College High school. The tournament went well. Our teams placed fifth and seventh. Also, out of 72 players, I had the ninth highest score in the tournament. What this has to do with computer science is interesting. Every packet contains twenty questions. It is guaranteed that 1 out of every 60 questions will be about computer science. For instance, a tossup came up about trees. Another person on my team stupidly buzzed and guessed "stacks" really early in the tossup. I was pretty angry. Once they said the big O run time, I knew the answer right away.

Also interesting is the software quiz bowl tournaments Some Harvard and Stanford quiz bowl players who also double as programmers got together and made some complex software that tracks individual, player, and teams stats in tournaments. The program is so complicated that it would require hundreds of hours of programming. I'll try and find the link. It's pretty cool software.