The variety of college students taking Superior Placement exams has grown tremendously—participation elevated in 66 of the final 70 years since AP exams had been created—at the same time as most households are unaware of the seismic shift occurring in academic requirements and expectations. Notably on the high faculties, AP examination scores have gotten extra essential than a pupil’s grades. Notably, Caltech and Stanford now require college students to report an AP examination rating of their purposes for any AP class listed on their transcripts.
Most households nonetheless view AP exams as checks for less than probably the most elite college students. However, in 2025, 37 p.c of public highschool graduates had taken at the least one AP examination. Throughout private and non-private colleges, greater than three million college students took an AP examination—roughly a 166 p.c improve from 20 years in the past, whereas the share of highschool college students over all has solely barely elevated over that point.
The change isn’t solely that extra youngsters take AP exams. It’s that bold college students preserve taking extra of them. In 2004, as an illustration, solely 5,967 college students had taken 10 or extra AP exams in highschool; of that group, solely 162 college students took greater than 14. By 2024, 83,747 college students had taken 10 or extra AP exams; of this group, 6,234 college students had taken greater than 14. For a sure section of college-bound America, the query is now not whether or not to take AP exams. It’s what number of are sufficient.
A part of that is simple to clarify. Nearly each faculty grants some course credit score based mostly on AP examination scores, so doing effectively on AP exams can typically save households cash in faculty. Extra excessive colleges supply AP exams than a technology in the past, and the School Board now provides 42 AP topics, so there are extra lessons from which to decide on. The latest choices embrace AP Enterprise with Private Finance slated for 2026–27 and AP Cybersecurity, already in pilot kind for 2025–26.
However the deeper purpose AP exams have so considerably expanded is mistrust: As grades lose their means to display tutorial preparedness, standardized measures are wanted to take their place.
In a long-running nationwide survey of faculty freshmen, simply 21.8 p.c of getting into college college students in 1966 reported having an A-range common in highschool; by 2019, 68.1 p.c did. An A common had turn into, effectively, common. But on the 2024 Nation’s Report Card, solely 22 p.c of twelfth graders had been proficient in math and 35 p.c in studying—the latter being the bottom degree ever recorded. Simply final yr, a College of California, San Diego, report discovered that faculty transcripts had turn into “much less dependable as a gauge” of seemingly pupil success.
Amongst college students whose fall 2024 placement confirmed math expertise beneath center college degree, 94 p.c had gone past the minimal highschool math requirement, and greater than 25 p.c had excellent 4.0 GPAs of their highschool math lessons. When transcripts say one factor and standardized measures one other, faculties begin trying more durable on the standardized measures.
Admissions officers are more and more candid about this. In 2023, Emory College’s dean of admissions stated that Emory is “not as trusting” of GPA and was giving extra weight to exterior assessments, together with AP scores. Even when high faculties don’t require college students to ship AP examination scores, many (Dartmouth, Georgetown, Yale, Princeton and others) suggest that candidates ship these scores for admissions consideration.
Some faculties have begun to publish the variety of AP exams their college students took in highschool. As an example, the College of Georgia lists that its common pupil within the final admissions cycle took 11 AP, Worldwide Baccalaureate or dual-enrollment programs. In simply twenty years, taking an AP course has gone from distinctive to anticipated. Maybe most tellingly, whereas the College of California, Berkeley, is check blind (it doesn’t think about SAT or ACT scores within the admissions course of), it nonetheless makes use of AP examination scores to guage candidates.
America didn’t got down to make AP exams indispensable. Grade inflation did that. Though a majority of scholars are beneath grade degree in studying and math, Gallup and Studying Heroes discovered that 9 in 10 dad and mom imagine their baby is at or above grade degree in these topics.
When transcripts now not reliably describe what a pupil is aware of, dad and mom and faculties must look elsewhere for sources that do. That’s the actual story of AP’s rise: not that college students all of the sudden wanted extra checks, however that they wanted at the least some measures that also inform the reality. Except the epidemic of grade inflation reverses course, the continued rise of AP exams appears to be like inevitable—and maybe mandatory.
