The Third Bit

Because all of those subjects are useless in today’s job market. Italian and French will probably be as dead as Latin pretty soon. Computer science and science in general is no longer one of America’s core competencies. Retail management is really all we do now. Can’t they just start an advanced placement class in project management or “interpersonal skills?” That’s what America’s business leaders say we really need now. All that low level mundane stuff like engineering can be done so much more cheaply by low cost offshore providers, while we concentrate on more inportant, higher level tasks like party planning, cosmotology and landscaping (wait, forget the landscaping. We need to import Mexicans to live in poverty so they can do those jobs that we don’t want.)

I don’t get it. They mentioned computer science once in the title and once in the list in the article but then never talked about ever again. They even listed the number of enrolled students for each of the other but not for CS. They interviewed people about the languages stuff but not CS. Even the journalist writing the article didn’t care enough about that AP program?

I found a weblog entry by a high school CS teacher that discusses this in more detail, at http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/04/04/college-board-to-discontinue-the-ap-cs-ab-exam.aspx.

Apparently there are two secondary-level CS exams, and one of them is being terminated.

See the discussion at http://usacm.acm.org/usacm/weblog/index.php?p=593
which points out that while losing one AP CS course is a blow, this doesn’t mean there won’t be any AP CS available (the much larger alternative course will remain)

But it retires in a good company, though!