Comment by FanaHOVA | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FanaHOVA | Hacker News Reader

This article sucks.

> In an interview, Ericson told me that a few points surprised her in the data, including that Mississippi, where 37 percent of the total population is African American, was one of the states with no African-American test-takers.

The thing they left out is that in the whole state of Mississippi just one single person took the exam! When you check out the stats of other states you discover that the number of people who took the test were in the dozens, not even hundreds:

> 11 states had no Black students take the exam: Alaska (21 exam takers -4.3% Black by population), Idaho (47 - 0.9% Black), Kansas (47 - 6.2% Black), Maine (161 - 1.0%), Mississippi (1 - 37.3%), Montana (11 - 0.67%), Nebraska (46 - 4.5%), New Mexico (57 - 3%), North Dakota (9 - 1%), Utah (103 - 1.2%), and Wyoming (0 - 1.2%).

> 8 states had no Hispanic students take the exam: Alaska (21 exam takers), Idaho (47), Kansas (47), Mississippi (1), Montana (11), Nebraska (46), North Dakota (9), and Wyoming (0).

> No females took the exam in Mississippi (1 exam taken), Montana (11 exams taken), and Wyoming (no exams).

So yea.. The usual attempt at manipulating numbers to get clicks. It just sucks, because this is a real issue to be addressed, but this kind of articles don't help.

There are nearly half a million public school students in MS. [1] Given MS's minority demographics [2], the fact that only one person took it speaks to the issue of access.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Education_in_Mississipp...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Mississippi#De...

And hardly anyone takes this exam because it's useless – what do you get in return for an AP CS score? All AP is useful for is getting out of general requirements in college, and no one has general requirements for CS. If you major in an area then AP seldom matters, as most departments don't care about how you got through the early courses so long as you take the more advanced courses.

what do you get in return for an AP CS score?

The same thing you get in return for any AP class, an extra point for GPA calculations. It's a pretty big deal.

The fact that so few people selected AP CS in these states deserves serious investigation.

It's easy to spin it that way, but to be fair, if you care about getting minorities into STEM, it shouldn't need to be a requisite that a bunch of white males take the test in your state first. (leaving aside the whole issue of whether AP computer science is a useful litmus test for that.)

>if you care about getting minorities into STEM //

Surely, what you should care about is giving all people the opportunity to enter the subject area of their choosing without unnecessary discrimination (eg based on unrelated factors). Just because there are students of a particular race that you want to take a subject to achieve your notion of perfect balance doesn't mean they should be unduly pressed towards that subject.

These figures probably give no useful information about equality of opportunity.

Nobody said it's requisite, it's just who happened to take the test. This article poses it as an alarming issue yet the statistical significance of this data is barely worth mentioning. That's 11 out of the 50 states, and all of those states (with the number of test takers and minority proportions) have expected values of between .5 and 2 black students taking the test, most of them falling between .5-1.0. There is a lot of context missing from this data to know if it's actually significant and presenting on only this side of the data weakens their argument by opening an entire plethora of counter-arguments about their data being misleading.

One thing to consider is that many rural states poor schools without AP programs. My high school in Idaho had 1 AP program for English and that was it.

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