It’s hard to feel sorry for the College Board, so let’s not. But let’s also try to understand an enormous dilemma that this enormous organization faces.
The Advanced Placement program is its biggest revenue generator and, along with the SAT, its showpiece. But where the SAT is little more than a measuring-and-comparison tool, the AP operation has long served as an indicator of educational quality and performance, often seen as the “gold standard” of high school achievement.
We at Fordham haven’t always gone quite that far. Our big review of AP and the much smaller International Baccalaureate (IB) program back in 2007 concluded that “AP and IB deserve most of the esteem in which they are held. Parts of the two programs are 24-karat…while others are less pure…. But they’re mostly gold and mostly worthy of emulation.”
We’ve been defenders and advocates for AP in the years since—and have sometimes declared without reservation that it is indeed a “gold standard.” One of us co-authored a well-received book that praised AP while also calling attention to the challenges it faces.
The challenges—and challengers—have, for decades now, included much debate over whether AP continues to deserve anything like a “gold standard” reputation. Or has it succumbed to “dumbing down” and “inflating up” like so much of the rest of American education, both K–12 and higher? (See this new Education Next article by John Moscatiello for the evidence of AP’s drift from excellence.)
We recognize some compelling reasons why it should succumb. Three come quickly to mind.
First and foremost, if “passing” an AP exam (traditionally a score of 3 or higher on a 5-point scale) is tantamount to passing an introductory college course in that subject—hence the long-standing expectation that one would be awarded credit upon arrival within the ivy gates—and demonstrating readiness to succeed in a more challenging college course in the same subject, then how should the College Board respond to the plain fact that it’s getting easier and easier to pass those college courses, indeed to get honors grades in them? Should the Board make it harder to pass a college-level course than the colleges do? Bear in mind that 19 of its 31 trustees have day jobs in higher ed, often engaged in “enrollment management” for individual institutions.
Second are all the equity pressures. It’s laudable that the AP program has swollen from a handful of courses taken by driven students at a couple of hundred private and suburban high schools into a massive operation—six million or so exams in 42 subjects taken by three million students at almost every high school in America. But it’s also well known that poor and minority students are far likelier to enroll in AP courses than to pass AP exams. A Georgetown University study found, for example, that “In 2019, 31.8 percent of exams taken by Black students and 44.5 percent of those taken by Latinx students received passing scores, compared with 72.4 percent of Asian students’ and 65.1 percent of White students’ exams.” Of course the College Board does not want to discriminate or be seen to. Shouldn’t it make those exams easier to get a passing score? Or at least add some exams that are easier to do well on?
Third, as the high school population shrinks; alternatives to AP, like dual enrollment, expand, usually without any quality control mechanisms; the value of a college education gets argued over; and renewed emphasis gets placed on career and technical alternatives to “college prep,” how should AP’s proprietors respond? What about expanding the share of students who take its courses and pass its exams—that’s good for equity, too—and introducing more courses in subjects that are useful in the world of work and don’t feel so academic?
So yes, the College Board has done some succumbing, most obviously by changing how student work on some of its most popular exams is evaluated, thereby boosting the shares of test-takers who pass and those who get high scores. In recent years, it has also added a number of subjects and exams—things like psychology and “human geography”—that are widely viewed as easier than the challenging disciplines it started with. And of late it has introduced subjects linked to “career readiness” (“Business with personal finance,” cybersecurity) and others in hot topics that seem more employable (computer science, art and design) than art history and “Italian language and culture.”
Yes, it’s all understandable. But returning to the “quandary” in our title, have David Coleman, Trevor Packer, and their colleagues entered into a Faustian bargain, risking the soul of Advanced Placement as they make decisions that alter its scope and rigor? If not its soul, are they risking its reputation by shifting its gold content from 24 karat to 18 or so? And, in the process, are they contributing to the dumbing down of both K–12 and higher education? If not contributing, aren’t they at least failing to resist?
Messrs. Coleman and Packer have shown courage and strategic good sense before, returning to the AP drawing board in the face of valid criticism, especially in the cases of their AP U.S. History and African American Studies courses.
But is it realistic to expect a nonprofit organization—one that depends for its existence on clients and institutions that find it useful—to continue to resist changes in the zeitgeist that surrounds it? Can the College Board in 2026 really be asked to fight back against the degradation of American education? A quandary indeed.
Here’s where we come out: We agree with some of the AP program’s critics that it’s a shame—and a problem for the country—that these widely respected tests appear to have gotten easier over time. As discussed above, we understand why that’s happened. And we understand that it’s hard to reverse, especially because it’s unclear what “standard” the AP should peg itself to, if not “a level of performance equivalent to passing an introductory college course.” A standard, we repeat, that is lower than it used to be—and lower than it ought to be!
But that doesn’t stop us from offering two suggestions.
First, in the interest of transparency, the College Board could declare that scores of 2 ought now to count as “passing” given the decline in college standards, making clear that this isn’t the Board’s preference but its acceptance of current reality, however regrettable. It follows that the Board should then urge states and nonselective universities to accept scores of 2 for credit and course placement.
Second, the Board should simultaneously work with the country’s most selective colleges and universities to determine a level of performance that would prompt them once again to give bona fide degree credit for AP scores—and set that level at 5 on the exams (then score them accordingly).
In other words, the College Board should use the AP scoring system to differentiate the performance of students more clearly than today by acknowledging that a 2 indicates readiness to pass courses in most colleges in this time of grade inflation, while saving 5s for students at the very top of the performance distribution, making the Advanced Placement program at least 22-karat-gold-worthy again.
