AP exams are easier: From Shakespeare to People Magazine

Advanced Placement has lowered standards in the last decade or two, writes John Moscatiello in Education Next. "Today’s AP exams require students to know less information, read shorter and simpler texts, answer more basic questions, and complete easier writing tasks with more time, more scaffolds, and more generous rubrics."

Instead of conceding that AP is adapting to lower academic standards at the university level, he writes, College Board leaders claim AP Exams Are as Rigorous as Ever.

It's just not so, writes Moscatiello, a teacher and administrator who is the author of The Great Recalibration of AP Exams.

Courses were “redesigned” starting in the early 2010s "to address persistent, legitimate criticisms that AP courses were overloaded with too much content and focused too much on mere factual recall," he writes. The goal was to focus on critical thinking skills and “depth over breadth” -- and to "align AP courses to the Common Core standards that College Board’s then-incoming CEO, David Coleman, had helped create."

However, "the result was that most AP courses were redesigned to reduce content, lower requirements, and simplify exam questions."

The problems start long before high school, writes Moscatiello. "In an era when factual recall has been de-emphasized in K–8 education, hundreds of thousands of high school students are now entering AP classes with weak content mastery and poor foundational skills."

Yet AP pass rates have gone up.

Dense, challenging texts have been replaced by "simpler texts by more contemporary authors," often accompanied by vocabulary definitions, he writes. "Incredibly, a 2025 AP English prompt included footnote definitions for words like 'optimism' and pessimism'.”

In the 2025 AP World History Exam, students were asked to "identify one likely audience" for a women's newspaper, he writes. One of the correct answers is "women."

Fordham's Chester Finn and Michael J. Petrilli suggest how to restore AP's credibility.

A passing score on an AP exam, traditionally a 3 or higher, is supposed to mean the student would pass a college course in the subject, they write. But "it’s getting easier and easier to pass those college courses, indeed to get honors grades in them."

Finn and Petrilli think College Board should work with highly selective colleges and universities to align a top 5 score with performance worthy of a college credit at their institutions. At the other end of the scale, "College Board could declare that scores of 2 ought now to count as 'passing' given the decline in college standards" at unselective institutions.