In his recent Education Next article, Paul Peterson claims that Advanced Placement (AP) Exams are being “dumbed down.” He even goes so far as to state that College Board has “admitted” the exam questions are now easier in response to less demanding curricula in high schools and colleges.
This is entirely false.
AP Exam questions are not easier than in the past, nor are they harder. The exams themselves have not changed. Well-established equating processes ensure the difficulty of AP Exams remains consistent from year to year.
So why have AP scores increased in some subjects and decreased in others? Because the process of converting students’ specific AP Exam points into scores on the 1–5 scale has become more precise.
The AP Program has a responsibility to use the best available evidence to determine whether students meet long-established learning objectives for college credit. Fairness to students and the universities they enter demands nothing less.
Advances in technology have improved how exam data are collected and analyzed, allowing statisticians to draw on input from hundreds of college professors and better determine which skills individual students are demonstrating on their AP Exams.
This work is part of a rigorous, evidence-based standards setting process, overseen for AP by Dr. Amy Hendrickson, the current president of the National Council on Measurement in Education. It’s the same process used by other large-scale assessment programs like American Diploma Project and PARCC.
When evidence shows students are not meeting expectations, pass rates go down. When evidence shows more students are meeting them, pass rates go up.
That’s exactly what we’ve seen.
From 2024 to 2025, pass rates rose significantly in subjects like AP English Language, AP Environmental Science, and AP Human Geography—because the student performance data showed more students were meeting the enduring learning objectives for these courses.
