The Advanced Placement (AP) program, celebrating its seventieth anniversary this year, has largely lived up to the promise of encouraging and rewarding ambitious high school students looking to prepare themselves for college rigor. Students who participate in AP courses generally have better chances to attend and succeed in college compared with students who do not. But questions persist about a lack of access for various underrepresented groups, leading to measurable gaps in participation and achievement over the years. The College Board, which runs the program, has urged policymakers across the country to take action to increase resources, access, and opportunity. A new report looks at one state’s efforts to do just that.
Arkansas mandated universal AP access starting in 2003, and strengthened that effort in 2005 by covering AP exam costs for all students. The mandate requires that every school provide at least one AP course in each of the core areas of math, science, English, and social studies. Theoretically, the mandate removed the most commonly-reported barriers to participation among students nationwide: availability and affordability. A group of researchers led by Andy Parra-Martinez from Mississippi State University dug into the data to examine the impacts of these policies on participation and, to a lesser extent, on student outcomes.
The research team utilized data from the Arkansas Department of Education covering the period 2016 to 2021, expanding on previous research that ended in 2015. The anonymized data include student demographic characteristics such as gender, race, gifted and talented status, English language learner status, special education status, and family income (as determined by participation in the subsidized lunch program). Additionally, they have access to students’ achievement in English language arts, math, and science subtests prior to high school. They use multilevel modeling to investigate the relationship between student- and school-based factors that influence AP enrollment and course success.
Approximately 31 percent of Arkansas high school students enrolled in at least one AP course over the time period studied here. This is an increase over both the pre-mandate (just 4 percent) and the 2015 (19 percent) figures, and approaches the national average of 33 percent. A majority of AP enrollees in Arkansas took one or two courses over their high school career. Female students were 1.6 times more likely to participate than males; Asian students and Hispanic students were more likely to participate than White students (1.8 times and 1.4 times, respectively); and students identified as gifted were 1.4 times more likely more likely to participate than their non-identified peers. AP participants also had higher academic achievement prior to high school than non-participants. Low-income students, English language learners, and special education students were least likely to enroll in an AP class.
More than 90 percent of AP enrollees ultimately earned course credit, with no significant differences in attainment based on any demographic characteristic. This is consistent with AP course outcomes previously in Arkansas and nationally. Importantly, though, Parra-Martinez and his team did not have access to data on which students took official AP exams over the study period, nor how the test takers did on the College Board’s score scale from 1 to 5. As a result, the researchers suggest that the use of school/teacher assessments, rather than official AP examinations, might be inflating grades and awarding course credits erroneously. Separate data from College Board, cited in the report, show that 22 percent of Arkansas students in grades 10–12 took at least one AP exam in 2022, an increase of 2 percent from 2012. Mean scores for Asian American students in the state grew from 2.6 to 3.0 and for White students from 2.2 to 2.5 over that same period. Gains for Hispanic students (from 2.0 to 2.2) and Black students (from 1.5 to 1.7) were more modest.
Ultimately, universal access to AP courses boosted student participation overall and among many typically-underrepresented groups in Arkansas. However, low-income students and students with special needs were still less likely to participate than their peers. In fact, school-level analyses indicated that having higher proportions of these students in a building tended to depress AP participation among other student subgroups, as well. Additionally, outside data indicate that making the exams free for students did not significantly increase AP test taking or scores in Arkansas. The researchers suggest that true universality must consist of more than just widely offered courses. For example, they propose active recruiting of students by teachers or counselors and allocating school staff to specifically support students from groups who typically don’t participate or underperform. These efforts would surely result in higher participation numbers. But until we have a study that takes into account AP exam results, we can’t be sure that expansion efforts are leading to better outcomes for students.
SOURCE: Andy Parra-Martinez et al., “Does Policy Translate into Equity? The Association between Universal Advanced Placement Access, Student Enrollment, and Outcomes,” Journal of Advanced Academics (December 2024).
