Our teacher had said that scores are NOT rounded;however, your final score on the frq is rounded.
@jkhuggins The day before yesterday, she admitted to us that the test was far too difficult. Then she tried going over the chapter she didn’t cover (which constituted for half of the lessons), and said that they looked too hard and gave up.
@ypmagic @harsh98 I’m not sure how to answer the question. Individual FRQs receive an integer score between 0-9. Sometimes, the scoring rubrics we use include half-points, so it’s possible to earn a score of 7.5 on a question. But the score we write down on the official scoring sheet is rounded up to the next integer (8, in this case).
Note that no rounding occurs on individual parts of the question (which may be what @harsh98 is talking about); all points are added together before rounding begins.
I should also note that it’s pretty rare these days for rubrics to have half-points on them. A few years ago, The Powers That Be made the decision to start writing rubrics only using whole points (unless absolutely necessary), which makes the whole question of rounding points much less important.
@XoXdreamerXoX yeah, that sucks. I hope you can find someone in the leadership of your school to talk to about this. If the test is too hard for your teacher, you need a different teacher.
@jkhuggins Sorry I posted this before, but about how many points would I lose if I forgot to account for the size of an array list changing during a loop? (I was doing a for loop and removing elements of the array and I forgot to reset the index) 
For the changing arraylist i used a very queer solution that i believe works but will i lose points for not using the solution that they’re expecting?
@thesoxpride10 I had a really similar experience. We spent a lot of time on writing classes/interfaces/hierarchies (even though GridWorld was removed, we spent some time learning it anyway), so the first 2 felt a little too easy.
MC had more reading/running code than any of us were expecting; I know a lot more people who didn’t finish vs ones who did.
@ypmagic Scores do get rounded after all points in one question are added together. So theoretically, a 2.5/3, 3.5/4, and 2/2 would equal 8, not 9 (which is rounding the 2.5 to a 3 and the 3.5 to a 4 before adding).
@keshavbk Generally as long as it works you’ll be okay. However, the rubric does list some basic things that CB believes you need in order to complete the problem. Depends on how “queer” your solution was I guess. The usage of a for-loop is generally a requirement for problems like the arrayList one.
@Defeat Nobody knows for sure because the grading rubric hasn’t been been released. Check out the scoring requirements from 2013–if I remember correctly there was an arrayList problem there too.
Did you have to create a 2d array for #3? I ran out of time, so I just used the arraylist variable. Im pretty sure I did bad on number 3, since I had couple lines of code, when you were given 2 full pages.
@Defeat There’s no standard penalty for that sort of error, but in my experience (insert standard disclaimer), that usually results in a one-point deduction.
@keshavbk There’s nothing wrong with an unusual solution; as long as it meets all the requirements, an unusual solution is still eligible for full credit.
@BunnyMonster Actually, the grading rubric hasn’t even been written yet. (I’m sure a draft of a rubric exists, but that rubric will get refined over the next few weeks as the leadership of the reading starts to look at real student solutions and makes sure that the rubric covers all the cases.)
If we mess up the first part of a problem and we have to implement that method in the second part, will we be penalized for those second and third parts? (This is regarding FRQ4, where I just blanked and forgot how to use interfaces.) I’m aware that sometimes it says that whatever code written before can be assumed to be correct but I don’t remember seeing it for that particular question.
@jinpachi Hard to comment without having seen the FRQs … but in general, the rubrics are designed so that a screw-up in part (a) won’t affect the scoring for parts (b)/©.
Did you have to create a 2d array for #3? I ran out of time, so I just used the arraylist variable. Im pretty sure I did bad on number 3, since I had couple lines of code, when you were given 2 full pages. This was the question regarding removing rows
@sb98park yeah i created a second array, copied the first array into the second array, then made the first array varibal refer to a new empty arraylist. then used a for loop to iterate through the second array and added anything that wasn’t in the specified column to my empty arraylist. at the end of all the for loop iterations, the new arraylist has all the values that weren’t in that column
Folks, we’re drifting a little close to “discussing the problem specifics” … wait until Saturday :).
Having said that … @sb98park, don’t necessarily freak out about the length of the code you wrote versus the amount of space given. The “ideal” answer is often quite short (though, I’ll admit, two lines seems a bit shorter than usual), but the exam is designed to give you plenty of room in case you come up with a more “unique” approach.
I almost cried when before the test I read every APCS teacher has to enforce atleast 20 hours of lab time and there would be an FRQ similar to those labs…
My teacher didn’t even cover labs.
Overall, MC was a little hard, just time-consuming. The FRQ’s were okay, the 1 and 4 were fairly easy. 2 and 3 were like whaaaaaat?
Most likely going to get a 3. (hopefully)
The wording of the question somehow tricked me into implementing an interface method. Yeah… :’(
COLLEGE BOARD, WHY MUST YOU ALWAYS MESS WITH OUR HEADS ON SATS AND AP EXAMS? WHY!?!?
How much do they penalize you for syntax errors? I capitalized class and interface when I wasn’t supposed to and also I added an extra set of parentheses (which apparently cause a syntax error, don’t want to go to specifics). Is that -1 each?
So many people are asking if something specific they wrote incurs a penalty.
Here is 2014’s “penalty” list: http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap14_comp_sci_scoring_guidelines.pdf
It’s page 2 and the same as 2013’s and 2012’s penalty lists. I didn’t check the rest, but I assume they’re the same. If you have a question about “I did _______, does that mean -1 point?” then check the list first. Nobody knows anything other than what CB tells us. Their published guidelines are going to be more accurate than what anybody on CC says.
@rdeng2614 Check the bottom of page 2.
Also, even though CB’s “zipped lips until 72 hrs later” rule isn’t really enforced, let’s try to maintain some level of integrity and not discuss our specific answers until the questions have been officially released.
@ypmagic The cutoff lines for the various levels (5, 4, etc.) are determined every year by the statisticians at ETS. The lines are based on various factors, but it basically comes down to this: it’s hard to know when writing an exam (both the MC and FRQ sections) whether or not this year’s exam is the same difficulty as last year’s exam. This is one of the reasons that ETS re-uses some MC questions every year; that way, they can compare performance on those questions to last year’s exam to see if (for example) a rise in scores happened because the exam is easier or because students are doing a better job. So, it’s not so much that there are conditions where ETS chooses to change the cutoff for a 5; it’s that ETS determines that cutoff line every year from scratch. The goal is for the “meaning” of a 5 to be the same from year to year, independent of how easy or difficult the exam happened to be.
@rdeng2614 Generally, we don’t tend to penalize very minor syntax errors (see the list that @BunnyMonster mentioned). Capitalization won’t be penalized. Extra parentheses … that may depend on exactly where they appeared.