The Exam, and How to Pace Yourself
Read this before Unit 1. It is the shortest page in the course and it changes how you should use every other one.
What the Exam Is
Two sections, weighted equally. Half your score comes from multiple-choice questions about code you did not write, and half comes from writing code by hand on paper.
That second half is the one people underprepare. Reading Java and writing Java are different skills, and only one of them is practiced by clicking through a question bank. Every code challenge in this course is written in the free-response format for that reason.
Where the Points Are
The College Board publishes how much of the exam comes from each unit, and the four units in this course are those four units.
| Unit | Share of the exam |
|---|---|
| Unit 1 — Using Objects and Methods | 15–25% |
| Unit 2 — Selection and Iteration | 25–35% |
| Unit 3 — Class Creation | 10–18% |
| Unit 4 — Data Collections | 30–40% |
Unit 4 is the biggest unit on the exam and it is last. That is the single most useful fact on this page. A self-studier who runs out of time in April has almost always run out of it in Unit 4 — arrays, ArrayLists, 2D arrays, searching, sorting, and recursion, which together are worth more than Units 1 and 3 combined.
Plan backward from that. If you have to rush something, rush Unit 3.
A Pace That Works
The exam is in May. This is written in weeks before it rather than in dates, so start wherever you actually are.
| Weeks out | Where you should be |
|---|---|
| 30–26 | Unit 1 — setup, types, methods, objects |
| 25–19 | Unit 2 — conditionals, loops, nested iteration |
| 18–13 | Unit 3 — writing your own classes |
| 12–5 | Unit 4 — the big one. Do not compress this. |
| 4–1 | Full practice exams under time, and the free-response challenges you skipped |
Starting late is survivable; skipping Unit 4 is not. If you are picking this up in January, compress Units 1 and 2 — with prior programming experience you can move through them faster than this table suggests — and protect the Unit 4 window.
When a Page Says It Is Off-Exam
Some activities in this course build interactive programs that read what you type. Those are genuinely fun and they are how you find out whether you actually enjoy programming, but reading keyboard input is not on the exam. Pages like that say so at the top.
The note is there so you can make an informed choice, not so you skip them. Two hours on a game you want to finish beats two hours on a drill you resent, and a person who quits in March scores zero regardless of how well they budgeted.
One Thing You Have to Do Yourself
You have to be registered for the exam. Working through this course does not sign you up for anything. Registration happens through your school, and the deadline is months before the exam — typically in the fall. Ask early. It is the one part of this that a website cannot do for you.