On a whim, I grabbed a copy of an AP Computer Science test-prep book from a local Little Library and ~treated~ tortured myself with a few of the example multiple-choice questions.
Most were... fine, if pretty unpleasant to read, but a couple were egregiously badly phrased, and one or two seemed to be outright wrong (i.e., had no correct solution).
Take this one, for example. If I'm reading it right, not only does it fail to define some of the variables it uses, but even a lenient reading of it seems to imply it will almost immediately hit an out-of-bound index on most input data.
Why do we put high schoolers through this crap, again?
![A picture of a question from a practice AP Computer Science exam, with the following text:
27. Procedure doSomething takes in 2 parameters, a list and integer, and follows the following algorithm.
1. Let min be the value at the first index of the list and max be the value at the last index of the list.
2. If max < min, then stop: target is not present in array. Return -1.
3. Compute mid as the average of max and min, rounded down (so that it is an integer).
4. If array [guess] equals target, then stop. Return guess.
5. If the guess was too low, that is, array [guess] < target, then set min = guess + 1.
6. Otherwise, the guess was too high. Set max = guess 1.
7. Go back to step 2, repeat until procedure returns -1 or guess.
Which of the following are true statements about the procedure?
I. It implements a binary search.
II. It implements a sort of list from greatest to least.
III. It only works as intended when the list is sorted.
(A) I only
(B) II only
(C) I and III only
(D) II and III only](https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/114/661/789/260/806/836/original/fba6a210f7eee3c1.jpg)
