<p>I'm amazing at Calculus, but when it comes to word problems in math I'm not the best. I got a 5 on AP Calculus BC in 10th grade. For senior year I'm thinking about taking AP Computer Science. People say that you need to be good at solving problems if you wan to take the class. I don't know if I should take it because I'm not to good at solving word problems in math even though I'm amazing in
Calculus.</p>
<p>It depends. I personally thought the test (when I took it in May 2010; I understand that in future years they’ll be transitioning to a new AP curriculum but I don’t think this will apply to you) was absurdly easy. For the class itself:</p>
<p>Are you good about looking up stuff you don’t know online or in a code reference manual and figuring out on your own how things work? Do you experiment on your own first and regularly consult others when you’re stuck? The best kids in my class didn’t use the teacher as a crutch or their classmates, but were entirely unafraid of asking for help or learning about different approaches to the same problem. The best geeks in general are fantastic at learning stuff on their own and figuring things out.</p>
<p>What’s tripping you up with word problems? Is it difficult to interpret them or understand what the requirements are? Are you just slow at synthesizing the information and understanding/figuring out what steps you need to do to solve a problem? You should be able to break things down in CS and distill big problems into specific pieces you need to figure out.</p>
<p>When you say you’re good at calc, do you fully understand all the concepts you study? Are you going beyond rote memorization and applying ideas to only specific types of problems you’ve tried before? CS is largely figuring out how to apply your current knowledge in different combinations to a problem or task. You can’t use the same approach for all problems and indeed that would often lead to convoluted code when a different approach might have been more elegant.</p>
<p>CS is not math at the high school level (in college, it definitely is). But both require sitting still for large amounts of time and patiently working things out. If you have the math mindset you have the CS mindset (as long as you’re good about teaching yourself stuff or clarifying stuff for yourself on your own).</p>
<p>Hope this didn’t sound condescending (absolutely not the intention), but rather a roundabout way of trying to explain what skills I thought were useful in AP CS and programming things in general.</p>