Courtesy of Penelope Trunk Education Society
For the last two decades, AP exams have continually grown into an important facet of American education. A pilot was launched in 1952 and tested high schoolers in eleven subjects. Two years later, students were paying ten dollars to take each AP exam. In 1955, the CollegeBoard took over and launched the modern AP program. Since then, AP exams have become the most popular–and financially successful–instrument of the CollegeBoard.
Originally, the Scholastic Aptitude Test–better known as the SAT–was the CollageBoard’s most important child. The SAT was created by Carl Brigham, and implemented by the CollegeBoard in 1926. Though still facing controversy throughout almost its entire lifetime, the SAT was seen as the essential test to determine a student’s academic ability for college for some eighty years. (As of the writing of this article, the SAT costs a minimum of $55 to take, not including additional fees such as late registration or scores by telephone). Since 2001, however, when one Richard Atkinson, the president of the University of California recommended colleges stop using the SAT as a measurement of analytical intelligence, the SAT has slowly become less commonplace, with universities such as Cornell, George Washington, and the University of Chicago not requiring students to submit their SAT scores. From 2019 to 2022, revenue from the SAT dropped from $403.6 million to $289.2 million.
With their major “product” not producing nearly as much as it used to, the CollegeBoard turned their attention to AP exams, offering new courses, such as business and the controversial African American Studies. And in 2021, the CollegeBoard started circulating a research brief arguing that even students who may have poor performances on AP exams experience benefits.
The result? APs have become the CollegeBoard’s most lucrative program, earning about $500 million in 2022, much of that money from taxpayers. The CollegeBoard has declared in tax filings that it only receives $5-$6 million annually in government subsidies. Yet what was not revealed was that, per New York Times, estimates, the CollegeBoard rakes in almost $100 million annually of public money.
How? How did $100 million dollars worth of school money from taxpayers make its way into the hands of the CollegeBoard?
In the last two decades, an effort has been made by the CollegeBoard to expand the number of students taking their AP exams. This has been done by pitching AP exams to low-income students and the schools that serve them. These students receive subsidies to take these AP exams courses. Taxpayer money from these schools goes towards paying for these students to take AP exams and classes. This seems great. The CollegeBoard has declared it a matter of equity. As the CollegeBoard’s chief executive, David Coleman, asked in a January podcast interview, “What if the best stuff in education were not just for the best to distinguish themselves — but could engage a much broader set of kids? Why are we holding it for some?” But what Coleman isn’t mentioning is that these AP exams are nowhere near the perfect, equal, and magical opportunities they claim to be.
The CollegeBoard, citing its own research, has maintained that AP exams help all students do better in college, regardless of scores. This claim is what has persuaded states and school districts to subsidize and pay for these tests. But in reality, around sixty-percent of AP exams taken by low-income students in 2023 scored a 1 or 2 out of 5–too low to count for any college credit. That statistic has remained the same for almost twenty years. Justin Cohen, who served as the president of a Massachusetts nonprofit that helped expand AP exams to financially disadvantaged students declared, “We should not assume the CollegeBoard is acting in the country’s best interest by lobbying for the expansion of this,” Mr. Cohen said. “What are the other things you could be doing if you weren’t investing money in expanding access to AP?”
AP exams are not nearly as beneficial as they seem. Roxbury Prep, a school in Boston, has a student body that consists of primarily low-income African-American and Hispanic families. Out of 872 AP exams taken by recent graduates of the school, only twenty percent of students scored high enough on an exam to qualify for college credit. A paper published in 2018 by Suneal Kolluri analyzed numerous studies on AP programs, and found, overall, “minimal to no impacts” from the courses on college outcomes. Students who scored a 3 or higher on AP exams did have slightly better college outcomes, the paper found, but the results were not significant. Another study, headed by Dylan Conger, a professor at George Washington University, examined 1,800 low-income students who were randomly selected to enroll in AP science classes at their schools. These students developed greater interest in science than their peers, but were left with “lower confidence in their ability to succeed in college . . . higher levels of stress and worse grades”. A paper published this year found that AP students were no more likely to enroll in college than their non-AP counterparts, and eight percentage points less likely to attend a competitive college. An argument could definitely be made that taxpayers are paying for students to take unhelpful–and potentially detrimental–exams. Meanwhile, Mr. Coleman, chief executive of the non-for-profit CollegeBoard, raked in $2.1 million in 2022.
The effects of AP exams are visible here at Williamsville East, too. I interviewed Ms. Bailey, who began teaching AP Psychology at East in 2007, and she mentioned some of the negative behaviors AP classes can breed, describing AP students as “intense, almost competitive with themselves.” And while some academic stress can definitely be helpful, Bailey has observed students taking this anxiety to unhealthy levels. She has witnessed absenteeism (where students, so stressed about exams, panic and decide simply not to show up for school), physical detriments such as a lack of sleep, irritability, rants, and even fidgeting and tears.
In her own personal experience with AP classes, as well as teaching in general, Ms. Bailey has noted that it appears to her that “lower functioning schools are struggling to get their students to pass.” The AP classes conundrum is a difficult one to solve, but Ms. Bailey suggests that perhaps the CollegeBoard should “decrease the amount of content required” for their courses, or, even instead of offering AP classes, provide a course “more like a local college credit.”
For some students, AP exams offer a chance for students to challenge themselves with more rigorous courses. But overall, it’s not clear that AP classes are beneficial to students, or even that those behind the classes have students’ best interests at heart. Like most things, the story of AP exams is a story of financial motivations, not just educational altruism. Perhaps Ms. Bailey summarized the College Board affair best: “there’s not going to be any wholesale changes until it hits their pockets”.
