I’m picking my classes for Senior year and I am debating whether I should take AP Statistics or AP Computer Science. At my school AP Statistics is known to be generally easy and the teacher is really cool while the AP Java teacher is supposed to be really bad and everyone has to teach themselves a lot. I already have several other AP classes for senior year so I dont want to have too much work from this elective, but I think AP Computer science would interest me a lot more. How difficult is the material for most people and is it easy to teach oneself? Thanks
AP CS is pretty basic compared to a good intro level college CS course. You can self-teach it pretty easily if you have the time. Stats, even if it has a reputation for being easy, I feel is harder to self-teach. It goes against the grain of commonsense modes of thinking in ways that AP CS doesn’t, except in some of the later topics like recursion, which doesn’t get that much epmhasis.
The best preparation for college-level CS is a good training in abstract, quantitative thinking - regardless of whether programming is involved. If you feel like your Stats teacher is more likely to give this to you, I would go with stats.