Undergraduate Advice

Should I take CMPSC 5?

For their first course in computer science, students choose between two courses, whose catalog descriptions are as follows:

CMPSC 5: Introduction to Computer Programming
Introduction to programming and the organization of computers. Basic programming concepts, algorithms, data and control structures, debugging, program design, documentation, structured programming.
CMPSC 10: Computer Programming
Introduction to programming and computers. Basic programming concepts: algorithms, data and control structures, debugging, program design, documentation, structured programming, object oriented programming.

The Department recommends that a student start with CMPSC 10, if the student received either:

a score of at least 3 on the the Computer Science AB Advanced Placement examination.
a score of at least 4 on the the Computer Science A Advanced Placement examination.
a grade of A or A- in a high school course on computer programming, where the computer programming language was C, C++, Java, Python, Scheme, or Visual Basic. Having used the "hypertext markup language", html, for example, would not constitute a computer programming background.