Okay, here’s my blog post about making an AP CS score calculator, written in a casual, personal style:
So, I wanted to figure out how the scoring works for the AP Computer Science A exam. You know, get a feel for how many questions I’d need to nail to hit that sweet, sweet 5. I figured, why not build a little tool to help me out? It seemed more fun than just reading a bunch of scoring guides.
First, I needed to understand the exam structure. It’s got two sections: multiple-choice and free-response. Each one is worth half your total score. Simple enough, right?
Breaking Down the Sections
Multiple-Choice:
- 40 questions
- 90 minutes
- 50% of the total score
Free-Response:
- 4 questions
- 90 minutes
- 50% of the total score
Next, I dug into how each section is graded. The multiple-choice part is easy – you get one point for each right answer, and zero for wrong or blank ones. No penalty for guessing, which is nice.
The free-response is a bit trickier. Each question is worth 9 points, and they’re graded by actual humans, not machines. I imagined a bunch of tired teachers with red pens… Anyway, you get partial credit for different parts of your answer. It’s not all or nothing.
Putting It All Together
I started by sketching out how I wanted the calculator to work. Just a simple thing where I could plug in my estimated scores for each section and see the overall result.
I decided on a simple formula. First, calculate the weighted score for each section:
- Multiple-Choice Weighted Score = (Number of Correct Answers) 1.25
- Free-Response Weighted Score = (Sum of Points on All FRQs) 1.3889
Note: 1.25 is 50/40, 1.3889 is 50/36. 50 is half of the whole score, 40 is the num of multiple-choice, 36 is the num of free-response.
Then, I just added those two weighted scores together to get the composite score.
Finally, I needed the score ranges for each AP grade (1-5). I looked them up and it showed the AP score is often curved. So, remember, these are just estimates!
- 5: Roughly 75-100
- 4: Roughly 60-74
- 3: Roughly 45-59
- 2: Roughly 30-44
- 1: Anything below 30
So yeah, that’s how I built my little AP CS score calculator! It’s nothing fancy, but it helped me visualize how the scoring works and what I need to aim for. If you find the calculate logic above, it’s simple to build it by yourself!
