Well, another AP exam has come and gone.
The 2012 exam is now in the rear view mirror.

This year’s exam is proof that you will never get the Bugs out of your code no matter how hard you try.

Having tortured my students with over 600 practice M/C questions ( Moodle makes this sooooo easy ) and volumes of Free Response questions, I felt the need to blog a bit about the comments I heard after the exam ( more than 48 hours after the exam ).

It never fails that after spending hours working to help students prepare that there will be handful of comments that upon hearing make you laugh and cry at the same time.  I have embellished these just a bit to protect the innocent and to slightly increase the humor factor.

These comments are in decreasing order of humor or pain – however you quantify them.
Please do your best to infer the extreme level of sarcasm in my [anecdotal bracketed] mental responses.

DISCLAIMER – All comments were heard 48 hours after the exam.

#5 – “We had to write programs all year long with Bug[], Dog[], Cat[], Alien[], Aardvark[], Chicken[], and Alligator[] arrays, but never any Horse[] arrays.”
[ I clearly blew it on this one.  How could I have not know to make a Horse[] array lab?  Arrrgggh!  ]

#4 – “What do you guys mean that you should always put private on instance variables?”
[This is only to prevent other goofballs from destroying your data from afar – the danger is apparently much closer. ]

#3 – “You should never in your life override an act() method!”
[Yes, all classes have act methods that are sacred and free from that nasty process called overriding and the multitude of assignments we did where we overrode act were just figments of your imagination. ]

#2  –  “I made sure to return on all parts of the Free Response – even from the void methods!”
[ My motto is if all else fails and are you are unsure what to do – just return.  Works almost every time.  Duh!]

#1 –  “We had to go through matrices over and over again and even had to count up all of the 5s in one matrix lab, but we never had to count up all of the 255s.”
[Once again, I clearly blew it  – I was way off by a whopping 250!]

I hope you enjoy this humorous post and also hope you have a great summer!
Enjoy the AP Reading if you are going and look me up if you need a Great AP Summer Institute!

Cheers!