2015 AP Exam Score Distributions

Once again this year, I’m posting a pointer to 2015 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.

I don’t know why I provide this free advertising for Total Registration, as I have no connection with the company, and do not endorse their services.  If the College Board would collect Trevor’s comments 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 2014 as of this posting—new results don’t go up until the Fall) 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.

My most popular post this year was once again How many AP courses are too many?, with about 19 views per day.  (It has also come in second over the lifetime of the blog, behind 2011 AP Exam Score Distribution.) 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.

There aren’t many exams graded yet (only 11 on the Total Registration site), so I don’t have much to say about the results.  I probably won’t be looking at the exam scores much this year, since my son is no longer eligible to take AP exams, having graduated from high school. I might look at some of the statistics for the AP computer science exam, as I have some interest in seeing whether there are any changes in the number of test takers.  The interesting results (about gender and geography) won’t come out until the fall reports.