Praxis Computer Science case studies
Praxis Computer Science · Put your knowledge to work in context.
Praxis Computer Science (5652) is one of the Praxis Subject Assessments, the family of tests ETS develops to measure subject knowledge for educator licensing in the United States. Candidates typically take it because their state's certification requirements call for a subject-area computer science test; because those requirements differ from state to state, confirm your own state's list before you register. We are an independent study platform and are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by ETS. The exam is multiple choice and is organized into five content domains that carry equal weight, roughly one-fifth each: computer systems and organization; programming and algorithms; data, databases, and information retrieval; networks and the internet; and impacts of computing, ethics, and security. The Praxis Computer Science case studies are 5 cases and about 2,909 words.
1The Memory Hierarchy Upgrade Committee
A high school robotics team runs a simulation on 40 single-board computers. Each board has a 32 KB L1 cache with a 1-cycle hit time, a unified L2 cache with a 10-cycle hit time, and 100-cycle main memory.
609 words, about 3 min2The Workshop Lottery
A middle school runs a Friday enrichment fair with 12 workshops, each capped at 20 students, for 240 students. Each student ranks three workshops.
607 words, about 3 min3The Slow Catalog Query
A public library's catalog database has 2.4 million rows in a table with columns id, title, author, year, subject, and checked out. The web catalog runs this query about 40 times per second: SELECT id, title FROM books WHERE author = ?
613 words, about 3 min4The 9 A.M. Video Freeze
A school has a 100 Mbps internet uplink. At 9:00 a.m., 30 classrooms join live video lessons at about 2.5 Mbps each, and a cloud backup job begins transferring 60 Mbps.
515 words, about 3 min5The Attendance App Breach
A district's attendance web app has 12,000 student and staff accounts. Passwords are stored as unsalted SHA-256 hashes.
565 words, about 3 min