1. Reduced Content Requirements
The lowering of standards in the AP program long predates the negative impact of Covid or the rise of artificial intelligence. The crucial turning point was a series of course “redesigns” that began in the early 2010s. This overhaul was intended to address persistent, legitimate criticisms that AP courses were overloaded with too much content and focused too much on mere factual recall. These new AP courses were supposed to emphasize “depth over breadth,” allowing AP teachers adequate time to cover material and focus on critical thinking skills beyond rote memorization. The redesigns also explicitly aligned AP courses to the Common Core standards that College Board’s then-incoming CEO, David Coleman, had helped create.
Whatever the intentions, the result was that most AP courses were redesigned to reduce content, lower requirements, and simplify exam questions. 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. As one AP textbook author argued, “[T]he problem is that AP exams are increasingly de-emphasizing actual knowledge and focusing more on ‘holistic’ skills.” The choice to turn away from memorization and reduce content within AP courses has helped create a whole generation of AP students who know shockingly little of the content they have allegedly studied at a college level in AP courses.
None of this should be a surprise. This exact outcome was predicted in a 2007 report produced by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, before the redesigns had even occurred:
Our fear is that actual content knowledge will be de-emphasized as “big ideas” eclipse facts in a potentially extreme tendency to favor depth over breadth. The College Board should take great care to make sure that doesn’t happen.
College Board did not, in fact, take great care, and the results are clearly visible on college campuses, where many professors have lamented that AP students are clearly unready for college-level work:
At the University of Texas at Austin, where I am a professor of history, we see the consequences of this trend firsthand. Students who pass the AP U.S. History exam receive credit only for the second half of our U.S. history survey course. To earn credit for the first half, they must pass a faculty-graded essay exam. A substantial majority of these students fail to demonstrate the content knowledge or writing skills that we expect from a university-level history student. This reality exposes the gap between what AP courses promise and what they actually deliver.
Similarly, according to one English professor,
At Colby College, where I teach . . . many students arrive here and elsewhere having taken A.P. classes. . . . [W]hen I teach a first-year writing course, or an introductory course in the English major, I inevitably spend the first few weeks undoing the damage the A.P. system does to how students understand both writing and the study of literature.
These complaints have been echoed by many university professors, most recently by Professor Paul E. Peterson of Harvard University. The concerns transcend disciplinary distinctions: One math professor has argued that AP courses are not truly college-level courses. “This equivalence is an illusion,” he says. “Calculus at my university, Johns Hopkins University, could not pass the audit to qualify for AP Calculus. This is equally true for many other universities and colleges.” Likewise, an economics professor has identified that the free-response questions of AP Macroeconomics “test mid-level understanding” rather than rigorous, college-level work. This crisis of standards has led some to call upon College Board to “increase the rigor of its advanced placement examinations to satisfy these colleges’ and universities’ expectations as to what constitutes genuinely collegiate-level instruction.”
It’s not just college professors beating the drum. After the redesigned courses were first launched, some AP teachers decried what they saw as a “dumbing down” of the program. When AP World History was stripped of thousands of years of the past, many AP teachers were “outraged” that their students would “lose a broad global understanding of history” as the course became more narrowly focused on modern and Western history. Across a range of subjects, critics began to question whether the redesigned AP courses were still at a college level. About the new AP U.S. Government and Politics course, one suggested “it is time to end the charade that an AP course is equivalent to a college course.” An AP Environmental Science reader observed that “over the years, the math has gotten easier on the FRQs,” while a veteran AP Chemistry teacher responded to College Board’s changes to AP Chemistry by maintaining the rigor in his class, even if he had seen “the level of difficulty plummet” on the exam. “[W]hen it came time to review for the test,” he said, “I told them that the AP exam will only have the ‘easy things’ on it, not the hard things.” Critics have pointed out that the new AP Statistics framework has reduced course content more than it did in the last redesign in 2018, which had already simplified the course. The changes led the South Carolina Department of Education to change its policies because College Board has lowered the rigor of the course so significantly:
College Board has removed mathematical content from the AP Statistics course, thereby lowering the rigor required for a fourth higher-level course.
Likewise, the new AP Latin course framework has slashed the required lines of Vergil’s Aeneid in half and left a major part of the syllabus up to “teacher choice units.” Similarly, AP Spanish Literature’s redesign reduced the required reading list by one third (from 56 to 38 titles). AP Computer Science has been criticized for a number of similarly “concerning revisions” over the past two decades, and AP Chemistry has been accused of being “dumbed down” for years. After College Board “cut 40 percent of the content out of” AP Biology, a veteran AP teacher observed that “the course now is a little bit easier on the students.” College Board continues to revise courses to remove content and lower expectations across most of the full scope of 42 AP courses. Taken together, these changes show that the noble goal of ensuring AP classes had “depth over breadth” has devolved into AP courses with consistently less depth and less breadth.
