Once again this year, I’m posting a pointer to 2014 AP Exam Score Distributions:
Total Registration has compiled the following scores from Tweets that the College Board’s head of AP, Trevor Packer, has been making during June. These are preliminary breakdowns that may change slightly as late exams are scored.
Disclaimer: I have no connection with the company Total Registration, and do not endorse their services. If the College Board would collect Trevor’s comment themselves, I’d point that page. The main interest in AP result distributions comes in May, when students are taking the tests, and July when the students get the results.
The official score distributions (still from 2013 as of this posting) from the College board are at https://apscore.collegeboard.org/scores/about-ap-scores/score-distributions, at least until the College Board scrambles their web site again, which they do every couple of years, breaking all external links. They post a separate PDF file for each exam, which makes comparison between exams more difficult (deliberately, I believe, since inter-exam comparison is not really a meaningful thing to do). It is also difficult to get good historical data on how the exam scores have changed over time—College Board probably has it on their website somewhere, but finding stuff in their morass is not easy.
Views for my 2011 AP distribution post show the May and July spikes. This has been my most-viewed blog post, which is a bit embarrassing, since it has little original content.
My most popular post this year was How many AP courses are too many?, with about 10 views per day. (It has also come in third over the lifetime of the blog, behind 2011 AP Exam Score Distribution and Installing gnuplot—a nightmare.) The question of how many AP courses seems to come up both in the fall, when students are choosing their schedules, and in the spring, when students are overwhelmed by how many AP courses they took.
The one AP exam my son took this year was AP Chemistry, for which only 10.1% got a 5 this year and about 53% pass (3, 4, or 5). We won’t have his score for a while yet, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed for a 5. He finished all the free-response questions, so he’s got a good shot at it.
The Computer Science A exam saw an increase of 33% in test takers, with about a 61% pass rate (3, 4, or 5). The exams scores were heavily bimodal, with peaks at scores of 4 and at 1. I wonder whether the new AP CS courses that Google funded contributed more to the 4s or to the 1s. I also wonder whether the scores clustered by schools, with some schools doing a decent job of teaching Java syntax (most of what the AP CS exam covers, so far as I can tell) and some doing a terrible job, or whether the bimodal distribution is happening within classes also. I suspect clustering by school is more prevalent. The bimodal distribution of scores was there in 2011, 2012, and 2013 also, so is not a new phenomenon. (Calculus BC sees a similar bimodal distribution in past years—the 2014 distribution is not available yet.) Update 2014 July 13: all score distributions are now available, and Calculus BC is indeed very bimodal with 48.3% 5s, 16.8% 4s, 16.4% 3s, 5.2% 2s, then back up to 13.3% 1s. Calculus AB has a somewhat flatter distribution, but the same basic shape: 24.3% 5s, 16.7% 4s, 17.7% 3s, 10.8% 2s, and 30.5% 1s. Overall calculus scores are up this year. The 30.5% 1s on Calculus AB indicates that a lot of unprepared students are taking that test. Is this the “AP-for-everyone” meme’s fault?
Physics B scores were way down this year, and Physics C scores way up—maybe the good students are getting the message that if you want to go into physical sciences, calculus-based physics is much more valuable than algebra-based physics. I expect that the algebra-based physics scores will go up a bit next year when they roll out Physics 1 and Physics 2 in place of Physics B, but that the number of students taking the Physics 2 exam will drop a lot. I don’t expect a big change in the number of Physics C exam takers—schools that are offering calculus-based physics will not be changing their offerings much just because the College Board wants to have more low-level exams.
AP Biology is still seeing the nearly normal distribution of scores, with 6.5% 5s and 8.8% 1s, so there hasn’t been a return to the flatter distribution of scores seen before the 2013 test change.
As always, the “easy” AP exams see much poorer average scores than the “hard” ones, showing that self-selection of who takes the exams is much more effective for the harder exams. When College Board and the high-school rating systems push schools to offer AP, the schools generally start by offering the “easy” courses, and push students who are not prepared to take the exams. As long as we have stupid ratings that look only at how many students are taking the exams, rather than at how many are passing, we’ll see large numbers of failed exams.
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