A “recalibration” of scores on the AP tests taken by hundreds of thousands of high school students means that this year, the share of students receiving top scores on some of the most commonly taken tests has roughly doubled.
In AP United States Government and Politics, 24.1 percent of the 329,132 students who took the test in 2023 earned a 4 or a 5, the top two scores on the test, which is graded on a 1 to 5 scale. In 2024, that share soared to 49 percent.
In AP United States History, 25.4 percent of the 467,975 students who took the test in 2023 earned a 4 or a 5. In 2024, that share soared to 46 percent.
Are the high school AP history and government teachers in 2024 twice as good as the teachers in 2023? Are the students twice as smart or twice as hardworking?
Not exactly. The College Board, which administers the tests and charges fees for taking them, says it is “recalibrating” the test scores to match the reality of the grading in the college courses for which the “Advanced Placement” tests can sometimes earn students credit.
High school students who received the higher scores this week were pleased, but not all of them understand that the 4 or 5 scores they got aren’t equal to those earned in previous years, but rather have been devalued.
Not everyone else is pleased. A teacher who flagged the issue in a post for his education company’s website, John Moscatiello, reports, “The lack of transparency about this recalibration project (and the uncertainty about which exams will be recalibrated in which year) has left a lot of teachers confused and frustrated.”
Moscatiello also notes, “The College Board has argued for years that grade inflation is rampant in schools and that objective standards like SAT and Advanced Placement Exams provide a stable measure of student success. But by aligning AP scores to college grades, is the College Board pegging its currency to another currency that is experiencing its own runaway inflation?”
He asks, “Will all of these changes undermine the AP program’s position as the gold standard of rigor in high school education?”
A longtime education policy researcher, Tom Loveless, warned, “AP is undermining its own legitimacy through an opaque recalibration of scores. Sad thing is, if colleges begin doubting AP scores, a lot of working class kids will lose a way to reduce college costs by reducing time-to-degree.”
The AP English Literature, Biology, and Chemistry tests have all gone through similar “recalibrations” in recent years, showing leaping scores. “No matter which way you assess the data—means, medians, modes, 3 or above, 4s and 5s, pre-covid, post-covid—the trend is always the same: AP scores are being deliberately and intentionally increased,” Moscatiello writes.
The College Board has been under pressure from a New York Times reporter, Dana Goldstein, who argued in a 2023 Times front-page news article that too many low-income students were earning low scores on the test. “Some 60 percent of A.P. exams taken by low-income students this year scored too low for college credit—1 or 2 out of 5—a statistic that has not budged in 20 years,” Goldstein wrote. “This year, taxpayers paid the nonprofit at least $90 million for A.P. tests that many students failed,” the subheadline on her article complained. “The grueling, multi-hour tests put many low-income students at a disadvantage. Their families have fewer resources to spend on test prep; they may not speak English as a first language; and they may have attended elementary and middle schools that provided less effective preparation,” the Times article said.
In her Times article, Goldstein also made a racial argument: “failure rates were higher for low-income, Black, Hispanic and Native American students.”
In 2023, 52.5 percent of the scores on the U.S. History AP test were failing, while in 2024, 28 percent failed. Likewise, on the AP United States Government and Politics test, in 2023, 50.8 percent of the grades were failing, while in 2024 that failure rate had been reduced to 27 percent. Again, this doesn’t mean that the students in 2024 were learning any more than the students in 2023; it just means that, after the Times published its article complaining about Black, Hispanic, poor, and Native American students failing the test, the grading scheme has been recalibrated so that students are passing who in previous years would have failed.
Some analysts are cheering because it means these students can use the AP scores for college credit and get a college diploma faster and for less money. But if the point is actually learning skills and content rather than shuffling students toward the next meaningless credential that signals no actual achievement or ability, the development is troubling.
I see it as part of an overall trend of confusing mediocrity with excellence, and of trying to address persistent racial and economic inequality by eliminating standardized testing and merit-based distinctions rather than by improving education and expanding opportunity. It’s less complicated to just give a student a higher grade on a test than it is to do the hard work needed to make sure the student can master the material. But at some point, when tasks that really matter are on the line—a patient on an operating table, an airplane being engineered, a presidential vote being cast in a swing state—the person doing the job needs to really know how to do it.
Ira Stoll, a former managing editor of Education Next, writes regularly at The Editors. This blog originally appeared as a post at The Editors.
