By Patrick Fitz

For students and parents unfamiliar with American curriculum schools, Advanced Placement is a program of courses administered by College Board, the same organization that creates and offers the SAT. Education consultants recommend AP courses as reliable college preparation classes.

As both a curriculum and a standardized test, increasingly offered at secondary, high, and international schools around the world, Advanced Placement should be scrutinized and weighed against other factors when considering a college preparatory curriculum for students.

What is Advanced Placement?

Advanced Placement is a curriculum developed by College Board, the administrator of the SAT. Specifically, AP classes are college-level course offerings in subjects standard in American universities. These include courses in the Social Sciences (for example: US History, European History, Microeconomics, Comparative Government), Maths (Statistics, Calculus), Sciences (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Environmental Science), and languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese).

This is by no means an exhaustive list, though the roster of AP courses is not infinite. That’s because AP curricula are structured as broad-based survey courses in disciplines that would constitute first-year university study. For example, the AP Course “Macroeconomics” is analogous to an introductory, semester-long survey course in macroeconomic theory and applications. It is similar to the first course in the subject that new students in the major would take. For most high school students, the extensive curriculum and fast-paced pedagogy make AP courses the most challenging classes offered in their schools.

Recently unveiled is the AP Capstone program, a comprehensive curriculum designed as a direct competitor to the IB Diploma program. A suite of elective courses, fulfilling distributional requirements, is supplemented by two courses that each and every student takes: AP Seminar and AP Research. The AP Capstone program is not yet widely available but will likely be increasingly offered in the future.

What are AP Exams like?

Advanced Placement exams are notoriously grueling—at least by American standards.

Each exam, often three to four hours in length, consists of both multiple-choice questions and written responses. Those who have taken SAT classes or have completed SAT prep will be familiar with the workload required to succeed on AP exams, although the material itself is significantly different from College Board’s other standardized test.

All exams are comprehensive, and students are required to be familiar with the full syllabus of material as stipulated by College Board. Certain language exams have a listening component. Many subjects have idiosyncratic exam components: a good example is the Document-Based Question (DBQ) on the US History exam, for which students consult primary sources from a particular episode in American history and synthesize an argument from the evidence.

Historically, each exam is offered in one testing window (depending on the time zone in the US and rescheduled in the event of conflict with another exam) and students may be required to take 2, or sometimes even 3, AP exams in a single day.

In the Covid era, AP exams were severely shortened (from 3+ hours to 45 minutes) and truncated (material only taught through March) in 2020 and then offered in a semi-online format in 2021. Moving forward, testing administration is likely to return to the pre-pandemic normal: in person proctoring over a three-week window.

How are AP Exam scores used?

AP exams are scored from 1 to 5, with results following a rough bell curve. Some exams are more difficult to score a 5 on than others; the exam with the current lowest percentage of students who achieve a score of 5 is the AP Physics I exam.

Some colleges and universities award college credit for sufficient performance on the subsequent end-of-year exam. This is usually a minimum score of 3, though this varies by institution and by exam. Many second-tier universities offer credit for good AP exam scores.

More rigorous universities, including those in the top tier and the Ivy League, will still often take AP exam scores into consideration for placement. For example, a student with a 5 on both the AP Calculus AB and BC exams could test out of introductory calculus and immediately into a Multivariable Calculus course, saving time and enabling more advanced coursework.

AP exam scores now have an additional function. As the SAT Subject Tests conclude with the final international administration in June, College Board has formally stated that “the expanded reach of AP and its widespread availability means the Subject Tests are no longer necessary for students to show what they know.”

It remains to be seen what exactly this will look like. As colleges and universities expand test-optional and even test-blind policies, it may be the case that academic test scores diminish in importance, while grades in AP courses are regarded as indicative enough of academic potential and also serve as the basis of rewarding certain scholarships. As AP exam scores are not released until July, this would place further weight on academic-year results.

How available are AP Courses and Exams?

Many American high schools now offer at least some AP classes, while some offer a full complement of coursework across all subject areas; students, in tandem with school administrators, can opt to take any AP exam after self-study at a participating school. This seems to be College Board’s argument: AP exams are now sufficiently widely available as to eliminate the need for the previously easier-to-administer SAT Subject Tests.

AP Exams are not nearly as widely available internationally as were SAT Subject Tests, though this, too, is similarly changing. College Board, administering the SAT exam the world over, possesses the infrastructure and supply chain to ship AP Exams everywhere it does the SAT. This accessibility, growing already, will only increase in the future. Here in Dubai and in Abu Dhabi, American curriculum schools (as well as those hosting the SAT exam) can, and often do, administer AP Exams.

Conclusion

Advanced Placement now seems to be College Board’s flagship academic property. As schools continue test-optional policies and the SAT Subject Tests are phased out, an academic-term curriculum still remains. For those with the option of choosing a secondary or high school based on curriculum (among other considerations), education consultants believe that AP is an increasingly strong option that well prepares students for US universities and offers greater flexibility than do other curricula.

- Hale Education Group