AP Computer Science Principles Practice Test (2026)

What is the primary purpose of an iterative development process in creating digital artifacts?

Which of the following best describes a "digital artifact" in the context of computer science principles?

A team is developing a new mobile application. They hold daily stand-up meetings to discuss progress, roadblocks, and next steps. Which aspect of collaborative development does this practice primarily support?

A data visualization shows the average daily temperature in a city over the past 100 years, represented by a line graph. The line shows a clear upward trend.

Based on this visualization, what conclusion can most reasonably be drawn?

A new social media platform introduces a feature that uses an algorithm to personalize the news feed for each user, showing content similar to what they have previously engaged with. While this can enhance user experience, what is a potential negative societal impact of such an algorithm?

A development team releases a beta version of a fitness-tracking app to 200 volunteer testers. After two weeks, the team reviews the testers' bug reports and survey responses, finds that many users could not locate the "log a workout" button, and redesigns the home screen before the public release. Which statement best describes how this use of feedback fits into an iterative development process?

Which of the following is a benefit of pair programming?

A company develops an AI-powered facial recognition system for public safety. While it could help identify criminals, what is a significant ethical concern regarding its widespread deployment?

A dataset contains information about customer purchases, including item ID, price, and timestamp. A retail company wants to use this data to identify patterns in customer buying behavior to optimize inventory and marketing strategies.

Which of the following analytical approaches would be most effective for identifying *seasonal trends* in customer purchases from this dataset?

What does it mean for a digital artifact to be "interactive"?

A development team is building a weather-tracking app following an iterative process. The team finishes a sprint in which they added a new "Save Location" button that stores a user's favorite city. During the testing phase, a tester runs through the usual scenarios and discovers that pressing the "Save Location" button causes the entire app to crash, returning the user to the home screen with no error message. The project manager asks the team what should happen next before the next sprint can begin. The team must decide how to handle the defect while staying faithful to the iterative development cycle they have been using throughout the project.

According to the iterative development cycle described in the scenario, what is the most appropriate next step for the team to take?

Four students in different homes are writing one program together and each needs to edit the shared code while keeping track of every change. Which tool is specifically designed to support this kind of collaborative code development?

The widespread availability of computing innovations like smartphones and social media has led to an increase in "digital divide" concerns. Which of the following best describes the digital divide?

A software development team uses a version control system like Git. Before making changes to the main codebase, each developer creates a new "branch" for their feature, works on it independently, and then "merges" their changes back into the main branch after review.

What is the primary benefit of using this branching and merging strategy in collaborative development?

When analyzing a large dataset, a data scientist might choose to create a "summary statistic" like the mean or median. What is the main purpose of using summary statistics?

TalentFinder Corporation has built an AI system to screen job applications. The model was trained on a decade of historical hiring data from the company's own records, including which applicants were interviewed, hired, and promoted. After deployment, HR notices the tool consistently rates applicants from certain universities and certain zip codes higher than others, and it rarely recommends women for senior engineering roles even when their resumes are comparable to those of male applicants. An independent reviewer suggests the problem traces back to patterns embedded in the training data itself. The leadership team asks you to explain why this kind of outcome is an ethical concern rather than merely a technical limitation.

Based on the scenario, which statement best describes the central ethical concern about bias in the TalentFinder system?

A student uses a block-based programming language to create an animation where a character moves across the screen and changes color when clicked.

In this scenario, what role does the block-based programming language play in the creative process?

Which of the following is an example of a beneficial impact of computing innovations on communication?

A smart home device company collects anonymous data on user interactions (e.g., voice commands, device usage patterns) to improve its AI assistant's performance and develop new features. Users are informed about this data collection in the terms of service.

While the data is anonymized, what is a potential *long-term ethical concern* regarding the aggregation and analysis of such user data, even if it's not directly identifiable?

An analyst has a dataset containing, for each of 500 students, the number of hours studied and the score earned on an exam. The analyst wants to determine whether more study time is associated with higher scores. The analyst instead produces a bar chart showing the average exam score for each of the school's four grade levels. Which statement best explains the impact of this visualization choice on the insights that can be drawn?