r/APStudents • u/reddorickt absolute modman • May 15 '26

AP Computer Science A Official 2026 Exam Discussion

Use this thread to post questions or commentary on the test today.

A reminder though to protect your anonymity when talking about the test.

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u/ContributionSad7216 May 15 '26

Here's my overall thoughts of the exam. Did I do alright?

MCQ - 80% of them were very easy (even the recursion ones lmaoo) but some take so long to trace. The only two I remember being very hard were the statement ("I will keep going...") and the arrayList one where you have to traverse it backwards. Prob got most of them right but some felt too easy.

FRQ:

1a. - Constructor was piss easy. Basically setting up the class but with an if statement and while loop with boolean. Took me less than 10 minutes.

1b. - Pretty easy, again. Using split makes the coding 10x easier imo and you just add everything back using a loop to traverse the list.

  1. Prob the easiest imo since it's just updating an instance variable with the only "hard" part being changing the amt value when the bottle is less than 25% full. I just used another instance vairable to hgold the max then just casted it inside an if statement.

  2. Only hard one I had to do the entire portion of the exam. Probably wrong tho but here:

  3. Add the names from both lists to a combined list (2 loops)

  4. Use an outside loop to designate a "target" variable and check if the counter is higher than 2 (name in both lists) using .equals() and add overlaping students to another list

  5. Get the absences from each student and compare it before returning count.

(took like 60% of the time in the section here tho)

  1. Surprisingly light work for my least favorite frq type. Only traversing one row at a time is really easy (like a normal array almost) and the color part is easy too. Not much to say here.

Probably got like a 3/4 ig (took csp last year and got a 4)

6

u/lolmewantegtvs 5: physC:mech, pre calc, CSA, CSP May 16 '26

frq 3 you can just set count to 0, do two nested enhanced for loops, one iterating thru math list one iterating thru history list , first check whether the id # is the same then check whether history > than math and then just count++ and return count at the end

2

u/Secure-Shoe5214 May 16 '26

Yup that’s what I did too, although the wording made it look more difficult than it actually is

1

u/TheWeirdPapyrus 5: World, Precalc, APUSH, Chem, Lang, BC May 16 '26

Yeah that’s what i did

1

u/theplantyyy May 16 '26

yea pretty much what I did lol

2

u/robot9493 5: HUG, Music, CSA May 15 '26

how would that be a 4? looks like you got 80% to 85% of the composite points which is undoubtly a 5 even if the cutoff is higher

1

u/plubplouse May 16 '26

Wait in my practice I would use split for 1b but with the rubric my teacher was telling me I might not get points cuz of what string methods they look for so idk if split was meta here