Why are AP tests being made easier?

Beginning in 2022, the College Board has been grade-inflating scoring of its Advanced Placement exams.

The Advanced Placement (or AP) test is probably the best college admission test that isn’t used for college admissions. If you are going to test prep in the modern mode, while you are being Tiger Mothered, you might as well learn some chemistry or European history.

Still, the AP is used for other sensible things like getting out of a final semester or a year of expensive college tuition.

So, while the AP test appears to be not broken, the College Board appears intent on breaking it.

America has endless self-created problems over the existence of racial gaps. For example, you might not be shocked to learn from the College Board’s report “Understanding Racial/Ethnic Gaps in AP® Exam Performance” that:

Like other measures, student performance on AP® Exams also reveals gaps by race and ethnicity. Average scores (on the 1-5 AP scale) across all 2022 AP Exams, for example, are lower among Black (2.1) and Hispanic students (2.4) than among White students (3.0) and Asian students (3.4).

In the U.S., high schools students take millions of Advanced Placement tests each May. These are scored from one to five with a five representing an A on an introductory course at a routine college, a 4 a B, a 3 a C, a 2 a D, and a 1 an F.

Here’s a graph I made from data in that 2023 College Board report of what percentage of each race score at least a 3 on the top 10 most AP test:

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