Students can take advantage of two ways for earning advanced placement in our introductory software development courses. Students can earn advanced placement through the Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science exam. Students who did not earn advanced placement through the AP exam but have significant software development knowledge, can take a department placement exam that is offered during freshman orientation.

The department placement exam is typically scheduled during one evening of freshman orientation. Students do not need to register for the exam, they just need to show up at the scheduled room at the scheduled time. Schedule details will be included in the freshman orientation packet provided to all new students.

Exam Topics

The placement exam is a paper-and-pencil exam and covers all of the topics listed below. These topics are covered using the Java Programming Language.

• Variables, types, expressions, and assignment
• Simple I/O
• if statements
• for and while loops
• Passing arguments to methods
• Arrays
• Class declarations
• Method declarations
• Constructor declarations
• Interface declarations
• Fields of classes
• Object instantiation (new)
• public, protected or private, and final
• static methods
• Class inheritance (extends)
• Implementing interfaces (implements)
• Exception handling
• Graphical user interfaces
• Mouse input
• Polymorphism
• Collections (e.g., ArrayList and HashSet)
• Generic types (e.g., ArrayList<String>)
• Recursive methods