AP scores are up, but why?

Test scores are down -- except for Advanced Placement scores, which are way up in many subjects, writes Kevin Mahnken on The 74. Are more students are doing college-level work? Cynics suspect the AP surge is a sign of lower expectations.

College Board, which runs AP and the SAT, adopted a new scoring method in 2022, Mahnken writes. The nonprofit's leaders said the scores are more closely aligned to college standards.

Critics claim the “Great Recalibration” has "dumbed down" AP scores. Harvard political scientist Paul Peterson makes that case in a recent series of essays in Education Next.  The higher scores may reflect grade inflation at the college level, he concedes. A score of 3 on the AP exam is supposed to be the equivalent of a C in a college course, a 4 is supposed to match a B and 5 an A. It's possible, though profoundly depressing, that an AP score that would have been a D-equivalent five years ago may now be a C. Or maybe a B.

Trevor Packer, the College Board’s senior vice president for AP and instruction, said the old standards were "artificially stringent." In a direct response to Harvard’s Peterson,  he dismissed as “entirely false” the notion that the rigor of AP exams has been diluted.

Standardized testing shows significant drops in academic achievement in the last five years, says Tom Loveless, a veteran K–12 researcher. College Board "started this [change in scoring] during the pandemic, and no one in their right mind thinks the scores went up during the pandemic. Yet the AP tests are defying what every other test is telling us.” 

In addition to the changes in scoring, some think the exam is easier, writes Mahnken. John Moscatiello, a teacher and tutor who founded his own test preparation company, says AP's English Literature and Composition test now features shorter, simpler literary passages.

With the exception of some very selective schools, most colleges honor AP scores of 3 or above, he reports. Thirty-seven states require their public universities to award AP credits. 

"Many of the same states foot the bill for economically disadvantaged students to sit for the tests, which come with a $99 fee," writes Mahnken. "Their investment in the program therefore imposes multiple demands on local taxpayers — both of which could become more tenuous if lawmakers and education leaders come to believe that the academic value of the exams and courses have been debased."

Growing numbers of students are taking AP courses, which are seen as a measure of school quality, he writes. "But calls for transparency will likely grow."

Dual enrollment is growing rapidly. Students often think it's an easier way to earn college credits than passing an AP exam. The credibility of those credits is being questioned too.

Many more students are taking challenging courses, writes Jay Mathews, who launched the AP boom 30 years ago as a Washington Post columnist. He created the Challenge Index to spotlight high schools giving students the chance to take rigorous courses.

When he started, "only 1 percent of high schools — just 243 of them — gave more of the exams than the number of graduating seniors," he writes. Most enrolled children from affluent families. "By 2019, the Challenge Index included nearly 12 percent of U.S. high schools," and "the top of the list included mostly low-income schools, many of them charter schools."

Just 94,000 students from low-income families took AP exams in 2003, according to College Board. "By 2025 the number was nearly nine times as large — 845,000," writes Mathews.

Not all students in AP courses take and pass AP exams. However, he argues that even students who don't pass AP or IB exams say they "learned more by struggling with the challenge."

Austin Sarat, who teaches humanities and social sciences at Amherst College, used to assume his students would do the reading -- "long, dense texts, week after week" -- he writes in Fortune. Not any more. Most can no longer finish a book.

Amherst is very, very selective. The mean SAT score of a student in the Class of 2028 is 756 Reading/Writing and 771 Math. Presumably they can read. But they prefer to skim.