Students score better with new AP tests; College Board denies revenue for struggling schools is goal

A surge in Advanced Placement test scores after a change in how the College Board evaluates the exams has sparked accusations of grade inflation.

The College Board revealed this month that it started scoring the tests differently in 2022 to bring up all of its examinations to pass rates of 60% to 80%. It said that range best reflects the letter grade distribution in Advanced Placement high school classes nationwide, as tracked by digital software implemented in 2019.

The share of students earning passing scores jumped in the years that each exam adopted the new system. Pass rates increased for AP English literature by 30 percentage points to 77.9% in 2022, for AP chemistry by 21 points to 75.1% in 2023 and for AP U.S. history by 16.7 points to 72% this year.

A College Board spokesperson said educator feedback and new data drove the decision to replace a panel of 10 to 18 scholars who tweaked the grading system every five to 10 years with an “evidence-based standard setting.”

“Revenue was not a consideration in our score verification process,” the College Board said in an email. “Our only goal was to ensure fairness for students and that we are setting appropriate standards for Advanced Placement that align with the skills valued for college credit.”

The College Board has scored AP examinations on a scale of 1 to 5 for high school students since 1954. Universities accept no less than a “qualified” score of 3 for students to test out of roughly 40 introductory classes in languages, social studies, arts, mathematics and science.

Critics have accused the College Board of slackening scoring to attract more students to pay for AP exams as four-year colleges struggle with rising costs and falling enrollments.

“The College Board is probably looking at a materially significant decline in revenue,” said Gary Stocker, a former chief of staff at private Westminster College in Missouri and founder of College Viability, which evaluates campuses’ financial stability. “They are adjusting their scoring to incent more students to pay and take AP exams.”

At $98 per exam, the AP system generated about $500 million in revenue for the College Board in 2022, or roughly half the nonprofit group’s $1.04 billion budget.

Mr. Stocker pointed out that more than half of all public and private four-year colleges don’t graduate 50% of their students in four years.

“I believe the changes to the AP scoring methodology by the College Board are primarily driven by profit,” said Shaan Patel, founder and CEO of Prep Expert, a Las Vegas-based company that offers private tutoring for AP exams. “Yes, these changes do ‘dumb down’ the tests.”

Mr. Patel pointed to College Board data showing that the number of public high school graduates who took an AP Exam increased from 31.5% of the class of 2013 to 34.7% of the class of 2023.

Surging scores

The College Board estimates that 1.2 million public high school seniors took more than 4 million AP exams in 2022.

According to the nonprofit, the share of students scoring an “extremely qualified” 5 on the AP English literature exam increased from 5% in 2021 to 17% in 2022 as the scoring system changed.

Over the same period, the share of “well-qualified” 4s jumped from 12% to 27% and the share of 3s increased from 27% to 34%.

Meanwhile, the share of “possibly qualified” scores of 2 plunged from 37% to 14% and “not qualified” scores of 1 fell from 19% to 8% of tested students.

“Yes, the exams are getting easier, but it is entirely possible that they were too difficult in the first place, just as the College Board has claimed,” said John Moscatiello, a New Jersey high school teacher who founded the company Marco Learning to help schools build AP programs.

Mr. Moscatiello, who attended the AP annual conference in Las Vegas last week, is one of several critics who have slammed the College Board in articles for not sharing the data behind the changes.

“Many people are raising concerns that the end result of this score increase will be a diminishing of standards,” he added in an email. “At the end of the day, the increase in scores of 3 or higher is staggering and changes the AP program in a fundamental way.”

According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, undergraduate college enrollment fell by more than 900,000 students, or nearly 6% of total enrollment, from fall 2019 to fall 2023.

In a July 22 news release, the College Board said it implemented the new scoring system in nine AP exams that were not reaching the desired minimum of 60% of students earning at least a 3.

Each exam subsequently exceeded that target pass rate this spring: AP world history (64%), AP English literature (72%), AP biology (68%), AP macroeconomics (62%), AP microeconomics (65%), AP chemistry (75%), AP U.S. government (73%), AP U.S. history (72%) and AP European history (72%).

The College Board pointed out that 72% of students who took the AP U.S. history exam this year earned a 3 or higher, compared with 84% who got at least a C in the class.

Advocates of the changes said these results speak for themselves.

“They’ve appropriately replaced [an old model] with a new model that uses much larger data sets, involves hundreds of faculty members, and can be updated in real time,” said Len Jessup, former president of the public University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Mr. Jessup added in an email that the new scoring system may be “just now better at reflecting an underlying trend.”

Declining value

The AP test scoring has changed as colleges eliminate many core humanities requirements for freshmen, making four-year degrees more accessible and affordable.

Some say this trend could weaken the appeal of AP testing for students who have traditionally relied on the exams to save on tuition by graduating faster.

Other pressures on the AP system include a surge in high school students taking dual-enrollment courses at community colleges.

“This shift [in AP grading] will hurt higher education by helping students skip countless college courses and graduate in three or even two years,” said Robert Weissberg, a retired University of Illinois political scientist and expert in pedagogy. “The impact will be especially large in English and some of the humanities and social sciences.”

According to the latest data from the National Student Clearinghouse, dual enrollment of high school students up to age 17 rose by 10% at all colleges from spring 2023 to spring 2024, accounting for 28.1% of undergraduate enrollment increases in the spring.

“In my opinion, I think they made the test easier so more students would be apt to take the AP courses because a lot of kids now are doing dual enrollment, which seems to be replacing the AP classes,” said Julie Giordano, the executive of Wicomico County in eastern Maryland and a former high school English teacher. “Why would anyone risk getting lower than a 3 on an AP test when they can get college credits just for going to class and completing mediocre work?”

For more than a decade, high school teachers have observed a trend of seniors piling up AP courses, which have weighted grades, to enhance their GPAs for college applications. They say these students have little interest in putting in the preparatory work for the notoriously difficult AP exams.

At the same time, conservatives have criticized the College Board for adding trendy topics to the list of AP courses to attract students and encourage them to pay for exams.

Recent additions to the course catalog include AP African American studies, which will be offered for the first time in August.

“The lack of clarity in AP curricula and exams is unacceptable for an organization that wields such massive influence over the schooling of millions of American children,” said Timothy K. Minella, a senior fellow at the conservative Goldwater Institute. “Students of all backgrounds do not benefit from this lowering of the bar.”

Chester E. Finn Jr., a distinguished fellow and former president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank, predicted that top colleges will raise the bar for AP scores as more students pass.

“It’s no secret that colleges resist losing tuition dollars,” said Mr. Finn, who has written against the change in AP scoring. “And the more students who seek credit upon arrival, the more loath they’ll be to confer it.”