Advanced Placement

Advanced Placement (AP) is an academic program comprising university-level courses and exams that students can take while in high school to prepare for university-level study. Each AP course culminates in an AP Exam, which students take to demonstrate university-level knowledge, skills and abilities learned during the AP course.The exams themselves are not tests of the student's mastery of the course material in a traditional sense. Rather, the students themselves set the grading rubrics and the scale for the "AP Grades" of each exam. When the AP Reading is over for a particular exam, the free response scores are combined with the results of computer-scored multiple-choice questions based upon a previously announced weighting. The Chief Reader then meets with members of ETS and sets the cutoff scores for each AP Grade. The Chief Reader's decision is based upon what percentage of students earned each AP Grade over the previous three years, how students did on multiple-choice questions that are used on the test from year to year, how he or she viewed the overall quality of the answers to the free response questions, how university students who took the exam as PART A experimental studies did, and how students performed on different parts of the exam. The AP Grades that are reported to students, high schools, colleges, and universities in July are on AP's five-point scale:
5: Extremely well qualified
4: Well-qualified
3: Qualified
2: Possibly qualified
1: No recommendation