Notes on Collegeboard Questions from AP Classroom
Initial Overview
- Requires lots of logic and mental gymnastics to solve majority of problems
- Strong mix of word problems and coding problems
- Easy to work with and complete with relevant knowledge
- Broad coverage of outside tech knowledge (like of the IETF) and public encryption skills
PROBLEMS I NOTED
Example 1:
- Big logic based question, tough because the wording wasn’t very specific
- Two options looked plausible to me - not affecting the number of messages per day and heavily lowering the size of messages per day
- Interesting problem, not immidieately clear how it was computer science related, more stats based
- Opened it up to me on how APCSP covers more than just coding
Example 2:
- Also tough because it required some specific knowledge I didn’t have
- Had to look up if digital certificates and IP registration for every device was real
Example 3:
- Required me to research redundant computer routing, after that it was just fun to analyze logically and find the one that only had one working pathway
Example 4:
- This was a cool problem, needed to learn basic computer encoding
- Learned about lossless vs lossy encoding algorithms
- Learned that it’s only useful to byte pair encode when the byte specifically repeats multiple times
Example 5:
- This one was definitely hard to understand
- Pseudo format AND and OR statements I referenced in the guide they gave
- Generally learned difference between needing only one to be true for the whole statement to output true vs needing both to be true to output true
Example 6:
- This one was expressely hard to wrap my head around logic wise
- Interesting to analyze the flowchart, kind of just one big if function displayed visually