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AP exams have become more important than ever in college admissions, filling gaps left by grade inflation, test-optional policies, and the loss of SAT Subject Tests. But how did we get here? This article unpacks the rise of APs, their growing influence, and how students can navigate this evolving landscape.
APs are an undeniable fixture of American education, with over 3 million students in 2024 sitting for 5.7 million exams and over a third of the graduating class of 2024 having taken at least one AP exam. Students interested in attending highly selective colleges know that APs, IBs, or some other form of rigorous course-taking are effectively required for admission. Numerous factors are driving the broad acceptance of APs as the de facto standard for academic rigor and the steady rise of AP course-taking by students across the country.
While AP classes began as the province of the rarefied few, they are now expected for a much broader segment of the student population. When I graduated from high school in 1994, a mere 459k high school students took 701k AP exams. Three decades later, in 2024, 3.08 million students took 5.74 million exams. That incredible growth did not happen by accident! What factors fueled this rise?
The AP program has been the growth engine of the College Board for years and is now the dominant source of revenue and profit for the College Board. According to reporting from the New York Times, in 2022 the AP program drove in roughly $500 million of the College Board’s $908 million in program service revenue. The College Board has pursued an aggressive strategy of encouraging a broader cross-section of students from all socioeconomic groups to complete advanced placement classes, frequently embracing partnerships with other organizations and tapping into public funding sources to reach underserved students.
In certain markets, such as New York, the “AP for All” campaign encouraged the expansion of the AP program to all high schools and by 2021 to offer at least 5 AP classes in every one of NYC’s 533 public high schools. College Board increased its reach into more high schools nationally and currently offers APs in over 23,000 high schools, a sharp increase from the 10,863 participating schools in 1994. Beyond the expanded reach, College Board has expanded the AP product line from 25 courses in 1994 to 40 today. More students have more opportunities to take more AP classes, from the 9th grade to senior year. These very meaningful increases in supply have helped shape the market for APs.
Students with strong AP credits can place out of college requirements and even graduate early from many colleges and universities. Shaving a semester, or two, off a college career can greatly impact the overall cost of a college education. My sister used her extensive AP credits to complete college in 3 years and head straight to law school, knocking off a full year of tuition.
The increasing focus on academic rigor has been driven by the declining value of high school grades to predict academic achievement in college. As grading cultures have become more lenient and A’s have become more of an average grade, colleges have turned to advanced courses as a means of differentiating students. Counting and assessing the rigor of advanced classes has become a fundamental aspect of evaluating an application, and this, in turn, has shaped consumer behavior and student course-taking.
While grading cultures vary tremendously across the nearly 30,000 US high schools, the grading rubrics for AP exams do not. A 5 on an AP exam communicates a degree of objective mastery on a criterion-referenced exam for students across the country. Students do not get points on an AP for having a positive attitude or trying hard: they are measured exclusively on what they know. Objective measures, using a simple 5-point scale, provide highly useful information for an admissions office.
In recent years, colleges have lost access to relevant information pertaining to student performance:
1. Class Rank
2. SAT Subject Tests
3. SAT and ACT scores (test-optional admission)
More and more high schools withhold class rank, partially to offset the grade compression that has occurred, in which a greater proportion of students are packed together at the top of the grading spectrum. Also, the SAT Subject Tests historically provided a measure of student ability in particular subjects, but these were retired in 2021, leaving an information gap regarding subject-specific student performance. Further, the move to SAT and ACT test-optional admissions deprived colleges of relevant data that had been used to predict student performance.
Absent these information sources, AP performance has become a more important means of identifying the strongest students from a given high school. Test-optional colleges that once relied upon SAT and ACT scores to build a class now look to other testing, especially performance on AP and IB exams, to put a student in context. A college may not have access to a student's SAT math score, but if a student submits a 5 on BC Calculus, that fills in the gap and communicates a great deal about a student’s math ability. When Yale reinstated test requirements for undergraduate admission, it allowed students to send in all of their AP scores in lieu of SAT or ACT scores, emphasizing the predictive power of AP scores.
APs are an essential part of American secondary education, and in spite of the few defections from the AP program that have taken place in recent years, the program only continues to grow in reach and importance. The College Board is all-in on AP exams, particularly as revenue from SATs has declined significantly from pre-pandemic days. Students can expect to see more, and more varied APs offered in their high schools.
When I first wrote about the rise of APs in 2010, I noted the growth in AP course-taking, alongside the heightened stress some of my students were experiencing. Nearly 15 years later, this trend of more tests and heightened stress has only increased. There is absolutely too much of a good thing, and students and parents need to be aware of the dynamic that exists between academic rigor, academic performance, and student well-being. Too much rigor can compromise GPA and/or student well-being.
