A US high schooler who passes an Advanced Placement exam can start college with credit for a class they never took there. AP courses have been officially available on high school campuses since 1956.
The College Board, which also runs the SAT, leads the programme. AP courses came about in the 1950s in response to a gap people felt between high school and college. They are college-level courses taught in a high school setting, with an exam in each subject.
Sit the exam, not necessarily the class
The exam is what earns the credit, not attendance. In most cases, the College Board does not require a student to have taken the AP course before sitting its exam.
Each exam is scored from 1 to 5. A score of 3 or higher is generally what a college wants to see before it will grant credit, though the exact bar and what a student gets for clearing it varies by institution. Of the 1.2 million US seniors who sat an AP exam in 2024, 22.6% scored a 3 or above. Some colleges instead use the score only to let a student skip an introductory course, without granting credit for it. Others grant both.
Scores have been rising. Take the AP US History exam, where 72% of students earned a 3 or higher in 2024, up from 48.3% in 2022. The College Board’s own explanation is not that the exam got easier or that teaching improved. It says the shift is a “recalibration”: a new, data-based method for setting the cutoff scores, replacing panels of 10 to 18 faculty members who used to estimate them subject by subject. Trevor Packer, who heads the AP programme, said the new method found that more students than the old panels assumed were “demonstrating the proficiencies required for college credit”. It was not a decision to inflate results, he said.
What it costs, and what it can save
The exam itself is not free. Portage Learning puts the fee at $99 a test, with a discount available for families who need it. High schools generally teach the courses themselves at no separate charge to the student.
The saving comes later. A US bachelor’s degree typically requires around 120 credits. A passing AP score can knock some of those off before a student has paid for a single semester. Parents, college administrators and politicians were already urging students to seek early credit in 1998, because it can cut the cost of a degree. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 1998 that one Washington state student, Rodric Hurdle, expected to save around $22,000 in tuition, room and board. He planned to finish his degree at the University of Missouri in two and a half years, using credit from a two-year college he attended while still at high school.
The subjects, and how many take them
The College Board now offers exams in 38 subjects, from Chinese Language and Culture to Government and Politics. Each high school decides for itself which of those it will offer, and registration for the courses is open to all students. Close to 3 million students take at least one AP exam each year.
Not every professor is convinced
The programme has faced pushback from the colleges it is meant to feed into. In the same 1998 Chronicle report, Bobby Fong, then dean of the faculty at Hamilton College, argued that a high AP score does not always show a student has truly learned the material. Hamilton was weighing whether to grant credit only to students who could also pass the next course in a sequence. David Mills, an economics professor at the University of Virginia, said some students arrive in advanced classes underprepared. A weak grounding in the introductory course, he said, leaves a student “in deep water fast”.
Universities have not stood still on where they set the bar. At the University of Virginia, a student needs a 5 to place out of introductory microeconomics, but only a 3 on the calculus exam to skip its entry-level course. Academic departments set those rules, and some are tougher than others.
