Week 5 is a full dress rehearsal of the Create Performance Task — the real thing, in miniature. Today: what it actually requires, how it’s scored, and the one decision that makes or breaks it — picking an idea small enough to finish.
Still in Programs, the last week of the unit. You have every skill the PT needs — lists, a procedure with a parameter, selection, iteration (3.14 was the exact shape). This week you assemble them into a program that’s yours, under real PT conditions, while the stakes are still low.
The winning move is scope control: a modest program that clearly contains the required pieces, plus written responses that name those pieces precisely. You already wrote the required shape in 3.14. This week is about doing it deliberately and describing it in the exam’s language.
Your program must clearly contain all four of these. Every one is something you built in this unit:
□ A list (or other collection) used to manage complexity — storing data you actually use. (3.6–3.7)
□ A student-developed procedure with at least one parameter that affects what it does. (3.12)
□ Selection and iteration inside that procedure — an if and a loop doing real work. (2.12–2.13, 3.1–3.8)
□ A call to that procedure from your program, using its result. (3.11, 3.14)
That is — word for word — count_above(scores, cutoff)
from 3.14, called from a main program. If you can build that, you can meet the code requirements.
The scoring guidelines award points for specific, checkable things — not for how impressive the program looks. Roughly, points come from:
Notice what earns nothing: cleverness, length, or features you can’t explain. A short program that hits every row and is described precisely outscores an ambitious one that doesn’t — every time.
grade_summary(scores,
cutoff) that loops through them, counts how many passed, and returns a summary.”
Small, finishable, and every required piece is obvious and explainable.
Before you write any code, you must get your idea approved. Use this self-check first — if you can’t fill every blank, your idea isn’t scoped yet.
When all six are checked, write your one-sentence purpose and show it to your teacher for approval. Scope control is the whole job this week — a green light today is worth more than any amount of coding.
Every professional project fails the same way the over-ambitious PT does: too much promised, not enough finished, nobody able to explain what shipped. Learning to cut an idea down to something you can actually complete and describe — a “minimum viable product” — is exactly how real software gets built. The PT is training a habit that outlasts the exam by decades.