Introduction:

This test, I was able to get 48/50 questions correct. At first, I had no idea how to do a lot of the problems. After asking Mr. Yeung about these problems, he told me that the topics I wasn’t sure on came from Big Idea 4. To learn more about the topics I didn’t understand, I watched all the Big Idea 4 AP Daily videos. After watching these videos, I knew how to do the problems I didn’t understand previously. I think the score I got is a good score and I think I did well on this MCQ. The rest of this blog will be purposed to correcting the few mistakes that I made and reflecting upon these mistakes and what I learned from this test.

Question 10:

For this question, I selected answer B (“The computers can communicate, but additional hardware is needed to convert data packets from one computer’s protocol to the other computer’s protocol.”) because I didn’t realize that all devices on the Internet communicate using standard protocols. I thought that the protocols are slightly different and more hardware is needed to transfer or communicate data from one computer to another. College Board’s answer is answer D (“The computers can communicate directly because Internet communication uses standard protocols.”) because of how devices on the Internet communicate using standard protocols which don’t depend on the manufacturer.

Question 41:

This questions asks which procedure would be most useful in fulfilling the purpose of the student’s program. I selected option A (“A procedure containsNegatives, which returns true if any negative values appear in the column and returns false otherwise.”) because I didn’t think any of the other procedures were useful and the procedure containsNegatives would at least provide if there is a negative number in the column at all. The answer College Board says is correct is answer C (“A procedure findNegative, which returns the row number of the first negative value that appears in the column or -1 if there are no negative values.”) because it can be repeatedly called to change the first negative of the column to 0 until there are no more negative values in the column left. After reading this explanation, I can’t believe I chose the other answer. This answer makes so much sense!

Reflection:

Overall, after watching the College Board videos for Big Idea 4, I found this quiz to be okay and I understood and correctly answered most of the questions. Even though there were a few questions I got wrong, after reviewing the correct answer and College Board’s explanation of why their answer is correct, I was able to understand the mistakes I made leading to me getting them wrong.