AP Computer Science A Assessment

[College Board Revised 2025-26 Curriculum]

The exam is 3 hours long and includes 42 multiple-choice questions and 4 free-response questions. As part of the exam, students will be given the Java Quick Reference, which lists accessible methods from the Java library that may be included in the exam.

The  AP Computer Science A Assessment is divided in two sections​:

• ​Multiple-choice | 42 Questions | 90 Minutes | 55% of Exam Score
  
• Mostly individual questions, with one or two sets of multiple​ questions (typically two to three questions per set).
  
• Computational Thinking Practices 1, 2, 4, and 5 are assessed.

• Free-response | 4 Questions | 90 Minutes | 45% of Exam Score
  
• Question 1: Methods and Control Structures 
• Question 2: Class 
  
• Question 3: Data Analysis with ArrayList 
  
• Question 4: 2D Array 
  
• Computational Thinking Practice 3 is assessed
  

​​

• Design Code: Determine an appropriate program design and develop algorithms.
  
• Develop Code: Write and implement program code.
  
• Analyze Code: Determine the output or result of given program code or explain why code may not work as intended.
  
• Document Code and Computing Systems: Describe the behavior and conditions that produce specified results in a program.
  
• Use Computers Responsibly: Understand the ethical and social implications of computer use.

The course content is organized into four commonly taught units:

• Unit 1 (15%–25% of exam score): Using Objects and Methods: You'll learn the fundamentals of Java, a programming language, and other foundational concepts for coding. You'll explore reference data as a way to represent real-world objects in a digital world and discover methods to perform more complex operations.​

• Unit 2 (25%–35% of exam score): Selection and Iteration: You'll delve into the building blocks of algorithms and focus on using conditional statements to solve problems and control results. You'll learn about iteration, another building block of algorithms that are for repetition.
  

• Unit 3 (10%–18% of exam score): Class Creation: You'll explore how real-world interactions can be expressed digitally by organizing behaviors and attributes into classes.
  

• Unit 4 (30%–40% of exam score): Data Collections: You'll learn techniques and standard algorithms to work with collections of related data, known as data structures. You'll delve deeper into data sets, exploring array, ArrayList of objects, and 2D arrays.​​​​

The course requires problems be written in the Java programming language. ​​