2014 AP Exam Score Distributions

Once again this year, I’m posting a pointer to 2014 AP Exam Score Distributions:

Total Registration has compiled the following scores from Tweets that the College Board’s head of AP, Trevor Packer, has been making during June. These are preliminary breakdowns that may change slightly as late exams are scored.

Disclaimer: I have no connection with the company Total Registration, and do not endorse their services.  If the College Board would collect Trevor’s comment themselves, I’d point that page.  The main interest in AP result distributions comes in May, when students are taking the tests, and July when the students get the results.

The official score distributions (still from 2013 as of this posting) from the College board are at https://apscore.collegeboard.org/scores/about-ap-scores/score-distributions, at least until the College Board scrambles their web site again, which they do every couple of years, breaking all external links.  They post a separate PDF file for each exam, which makes comparison between exams more difficult (deliberately, I believe, since inter-exam comparison is not really a meaningful thing to do).  It is also difficult to get good historical data on how the exam scores have changed over time—College Board probably has it on their website somewhere, but finding stuff in their morass is not easy.

Views for my 2011 AP distribution post show the May and July spikes. This has been my most-viewed blog post, which is a bit embarrassing, since it has little original content.

My 2013 AP distribution post has not been as popular, probably because of search engine placement at Google.

My most popular post this year was How many AP courses are too many?, with about 10 views per day.  (It has also come in third over the lifetime of the blog, behind 2011 AP Exam Score Distribution and Installing gnuplot—a nightmare.) The question of how many AP courses seems to come up both in the fall, when students are choosing their schedules, and in the spring, when students are overwhelmed by how many AP courses they took.

The one AP exam my son took this year was AP Chemistry, for which only 10.1% got a 5 this year and about 53% pass (3, 4, or 5). We won’t have his score for a while yet, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed for a 5.  He finished all the free-response questions, so he’s got a good shot at it.

The Computer Science A exam saw an increase of 33% in test takers, with about a 61% pass rate (3, 4, or 5). The exams scores were heavily bimodal, with peaks at scores of 4 and at 1.  I wonder whether the new AP CS courses that Google funded contributed more to the 4s or to the 1s. I also wonder whether the scores clustered by schools, with some schools doing a decent job of teaching Java syntax (most of what the AP CS exam covers, so far as I can tell) and some doing a terrible job, or whether the bimodal distribution is happening within classes also.  I suspect clustering by school is more prevalent. The bimodal distribution of scores was there in 2011, 2012, and 2013 also, so is not a new phenomenon.  (Calculus BC sees a similar bimodal distribution in past years—the 2014 distribution is not available yet.) Update 2014 July 13: all score distributions are now available, and Calculus BC is indeed very bimodal with 48.3% 5s, 16.8% 4s, 16.4% 3s, 5.2% 2s, then back up to 13.3% 1s. Calculus AB has a somewhat flatter distribution, but the same basic shape: 24.3% 5s, 16.7% 4s, 17.7% 3s, 10.8% 2s, and 30.5% 1s. Overall calculus scores are up this year.  The 30.5% 1s on Calculus AB indicates that a lot of unprepared students are taking that test.  Is this the “AP-for-everyone” meme’s fault?

Physics B scores were way down this year, and Physics C scores way up—maybe the good students are getting the message that if you want to go into physical sciences, calculus-based physics is much more valuable than algebra-based physics. I expect that the algebra-based physics scores will go up a bit next year when they roll out Physics 1 and Physics 2 in place of Physics B, but that the number of students taking the Physics 2 exam will drop a lot.  I don’t expect a big change in the number of Physics C exam takers—schools that are offering calculus-based physics will not be changing their offerings much just because the College Board wants to have more low-level exams.

AP Biology is still  seeing the nearly normal distribution of scores, with 6.5% 5s and 8.8% 1s, so there hasn’t been a return to the flatter distribution of scores seen before the 2013 test change.

As always, the “easy” AP exams see much poorer average scores than the “hard” ones, showing that self-selection of who takes the exams is much more effective for the harder exams. When College Board and the high-school rating systems push schools to offer AP, the schools generally start by offering the “easy” courses, and push students who are not prepared to take the exams.  As long as we have stupid ratings that look only at how many students are taking the exams, rather than at how many are passing, we’ll see large numbers of failed exams.

Chapter 14 done

We’re a week behind already, because we did not get any of the Chapter 14 homework done during the trip to Boulder, but we did finally get Chapter 14 done today. The twelve problems I assigned for Chapter 14 (plus one program) were too many, because they were almost all just plug-in-numbers-and-turn-the-crank exercises (despite having been given “P” for problem rather than “X” for exercise). I was rather tired last night and this morning when I did the problems, and I made a huge number of copying errors: copying the charge of an electron wrong (and using it for all the exercises that needed charge of proton or electron), copying the wrong line from a problem, copying numbers wrong from my calculator to the paper, … .  I don’t think I’ve ever had so many wrong answers. On only one problem when my son and I compared answers did we get different results that stemmed from his error rather than mine (and that was also a clerical error, not a conceptual one).

There was one problem that wasn’t just an exercise, though my son treated it as one.  That problem is 14P40 part c:

The electric field at a location C points north, and the magnitude is 1×10⁶ N/C.  Give numerical answers to the following questions:

…

(c) where should you place a proton and an electron, at equal distances from C, to produce this field.

Locus of positions for electron with C at origin. The proton would be symmetrically located at (x,-y) for an electron located at (x,y). Locus plotted by Wolfram Alpha command “plot y/(x^2+y^2)^(3/2)=347.2E12”

The trivial answer places an electron to the north and a proton to the south, and students just compute the distance. But there are an infinite number of solutions and the locus of the solutions is an interesting one.  I don’t know whether the authors were thinking of this infinite set of solutions, or if they had only considered the trivial solution.

Since C is equidistant from the proton and electron, it must be on the perpendicular bisector of the line segment between them. Since the field points north, and we’re on the perpendicular bisector, the electron must be due north of the proton. If we do a 2D plot, putting C at the origin and the electron at (x,y), we get a formula of the form , which we can ask Wolfram Alpha to plot for us. Note: I’m deliberately not providing the derivation for the number, so that students have to do some work before copying this answer!

The trivial solution is the one on the y-axis (not the origin). I had not expected to see the lower part of the curve, where the locus approaches the origin, but it makes sense. If we look at the formula in polar coordinates, we get , where r is the distance from C to the electron (and to the proton), and θ is the angle from the horizontal axis (angle north of east). This parameterization also makes it easier to find where the x value is maximized by taking the derivative of with respect to θ, and setting it to 0. I get the maximal value for x as about 3.33E-08 m, at about 35.26°.

For very small angles, the electron and proton need to be very close together, though the solutions with them too close together are bogus, because classical electrostatics breaks down once quantum effects become significant.

The polar plot made by giving Wolfram Alpha “polar plot r=sqrt(sin(theta) / 347.2e12)” is cleaner and faster than solving for the x,y values directly.

For next week, we’ll have to read Chapter 15. I should have some problems selected before this weekend.

Chapter 14 homework

We’re already almost a week behind in physics, having intended to finish Chapter 13 last week, and instead finishing up the homework for tomorrow. We’ve both read Chapter 14, which is a short chapter on electric fields, so we should be able to get back on schedule, finish Chapter 14 by next week (except that my son and I will be visiting my Dad in Boulder Saturday through Tuesday, which will cut into our physics time, so it is highly probable that the schedule will slip again).

Chapter 14 homework—due 2012 Sept 25

14P23, 14P24, 14P40, 14P43, 14P47, 14P51, 14P52, 14P53, 14P70, 14P73, 14P75, 14P76
Computational problem: 14P78

Physics C: E&M curriculum for year and Chapter 13 homework

I’ll be homeschooling my son in calculus-based physics again this year, using the Matter and Interactions book.  The school  year has started for him, so now I have to put together a schedule for finishing the book this year. I want him prepared  for the AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism test in May. We never got around to Chapter 13 last year on thermodynamics, so I’ll tack that onto the beginning of this year’s schedule.

It looks like I have 34 Tuesdays to cover 568 pages, which is about 17 pages a week.  Assuming that each chapter’s length is roughly proportional to how much time it takes to cover it, I’m planning on

Chapter	pages	weeks	Finish by
13	41	2	Sept 11
14	31	2	Sept 25
15	44	3	Oct 16
16	36	2	Oct 30
17	46	3	Nov 20
18	41	2	Dec 4
19	42	3	Jan 1
20	42	2	Jan 15
21	63	4	Feb 12
22	50	3	Feb 26
23	38	2	Mar 12
24	55	4	Apr 9
25	40	2	Apr 23

Chapter 13 homework—due 2012 Sept 11

13P19, 13P20, 13P22, 13P26, 13P27, 13P28, 13P32

We should probably go over the first three problems on 2012 Sept 4 and do a gas pressure lab of some sort (probably pressure and temperature measurements).  I bought some physics toys last spring that may be suitable for the lab.

 

Reporting bugs in books and web sites

Yesterday, while working problems in Chapter 12 of Matter and Interactions (about entropy and temperature),my son and I each found a bug.  The one I found was in the book, the one he found was in Wolfram Alpha.  I reported both of them to the respective sources.

Here is the exchange with Bruce Sherwood, one of the authors of Matter and Interactions.  Last night I wrote

I was doing the entropy calculations for 12.P.40 and decided to see if the number of states values were consistent.  I found that they were consistent with having 170 oscillators, which made the choice of 100 atoms seem strange to me.  What arrangement of atoms gives only 170 degrees of freedom for 100 atoms?

In just over an hour, Prof. Sherwood responded

Thanks! It’s clearly an error. And I note that with 170/3 = about 57 atoms, the per-atom heat capacity is about 2.8e-23 J/K, still less than the classical 3k_B limit, as is expected for the low temperature (about 113 K).

The simplest way to “fix” this would seem to be to say in part (c) that there are 57 atoms in this nanoparticle. Would you agree? You might be the only person in the world who has gone to the trouble to check whether the “100 atoms” made sense, though I would like to think we did a reality check on this in making up the problem but made a mistake.

While I’m pleased by how quickly he responds to my comments and that I apparently worked the problem correctly (all  this quantum mechanics is new to me), I’m a little disturbed by the assumption that I’m the only one checking my physics homework problems for consistency.  (Though since no one else has previously reported the problem to Prof. Sherwood, his assumption may well be correct.)

The problem my son found was in doing 12.P.48, which gives a mechanics problem that involves forces, rotating objects, and a brake.  The problem ends with a computation of how much the iron masses heat up as a result of the energy dissipated by the brake.  We  both used the high-temperature approximation of the atomic specific heat of Fe, getting a molar specific heat of about 25 J/(K mol), which should be fairly universal for simple solids at high temperature.  He looked up the specific heat of iron on Wolfram Alpha (his go-to source for numeric and mathematical information) and found that they had the molar specific heat as 251 J/(K mol).  He came to me for help, because he couldn’t find an error in his computation.  I suggested looking at some other references on the web.  They all had values around 25 J/(K mol), so I reported the apparent data entry error to Wolfram Alpha, suggesting that they should have done consistency checks on their molar specific heats.  I’m amazed that we seem to be the first ones to have caught this error—has no one ever used this entry in Wolfram Alpha’s database? Does no one do consistency checks on the data they find on the web? (I know that consistency checks on data entry are often done, but things slip through even well-designed data screens.)

So far all we have from Wolfram Alpha is the robomessage:

We appreciate your feedback regarding Wolfram|Alpha. The issue you reported has been passed along to our development team for review. Thank you for helping us improve Wolfram|Alpha.

But we can hardly expect commercial companies to work the sorts of hours that professors do, nor to admit to errors without piles of internal bureaucracy.

Of course, Wolfram Alpha is not the first web source whose information I’ve attempted to correct.  I have frequently sent Google Maps corrections on the bicycle routing information in Santa Cruz.  They usually respond in between 2 weeks and 2 months, and usually agree that I’m correct and claim to have fixed the problem.  About half the time they have fixed the problem, but one remains persistent—they keep sending bicyclists up the downhill-only leg of the bike path on the UCSC campus, though they have twice claimed to have fixed the problem.  The bike path is on a steep hill and is divided like a freeway, with the uphill path going around the hill and the downhill path going over the top and straight down.  Because the path is fairly narrow and downhill speeds exceed  35 mph, it is extremely dangerous to be routing bikes or pedestrians up the downhill path. The path is dangerous enough for downhill riders (I lost my spleen in a solo crash coming down that path in March 2000) without oncoming traffic.

I suspect that Google Maps has a database representation problem, lacking the ability to code a route as both one-way and bikes-only, so the fix may require more development work than the QA staff is authorized to do—that’s why I always check to see if it has really been fixed as they claim.  Their repeated reporting of the problem as fixed when it clearly is not indicates a serious management problem among Google Maps QA staff, who probably are evaluated on how many problems they clear, with no check for whether the problems are really resolved properly.