For many years, I believed that the Advanced Placement United States History (APUSH) exam was a truly noble endeavor with which I have been connected for decades. Every human society has had its “storytellers” who inform the young about their tribe’s past. Here, we call them history teachers. I have delighted in my association with APUSH since I took the exam in high school almost fifty years ago.
Therefore, a sentence from an Education Next article shook me to my core.
“In AP United States History, 25.4 percent of the 467,975 students who took the test in 2023 earned a 4 or a 5. In 2024, that share soared to 46 percent.”
In other words, the number of students getting the highest grades almost doubled in a single year.
The Mechanics of a National Exam
I should begin with a bit of information about those scores. Students who take the APUSH exam get a numeric score from one to five. The College Board administers the exam through its Educational Testing Service (ETS) arm. While ETS resists such easy comparisons, many students and teachers operate as though a five is roughly equivalent to an “A,” a four is a “B,” and so on down.
Once, the College Board referred to the AP exams as “competitive.” Each student vies against all the other students taking the exam. After the scores are tabulated, ETS divides them into the five categories. In the past, the distribution followed a form of the infamous “Bell Curve.” The top ten or so percent earned a five, the next twenty percent captured a four, the largest group—around forty percent—got a three, another twenty percent secured a two, and the lowest ten percent received a one. These are rough figures, the actual distribution always varied. Usually, the top and bottom scores expanded slightly with a corresponding contraction in the middle.
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The students’ motivations are twofold. First, high scores on AP exams make it easier to gain acceptance to a favored university. Second, those scores tell universities that the student has successfully completed college-level work.
The Original Purpose
The first students sat for the exam in 1956. It was primarily given at “prep schools” that fed into Ivy League universities. Over time, it spread slowly, first to schools in prosperous suburban areas nationwide and, far later, into the general education system.
I am, perhaps, an indication of this spread. I was the first person in my suburban Michigan high school to take the exam in 1974. Our school’s connection to the AP program was through a very active AP English Literature class. As a middling student, I knew I would not do well in the English course.
However, I loved history, and my grades reflected that. One day, I found out that there was an AP American History exam. I approached our school’s best history teacher and asked him if I could do an independent second-year study of American history. He knew little of the exam but graciously consented to work with me.
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I still remember the thrill of opening the score report and finding the number “4” on it. That entitled me to three credits in American History to 1865 and three more in American History from 1865. I possessed those credits before ever entering the doors of my local community college. I was in the top thirty percent of the elite students who had taken the exam, a verifiable fact that swelled the head of this child of working-class parents.
A Teacher’s Point of View
A decade later, I taught AP American History at a public school in Miami for twelve years. Then, I moved north and taught the same course for another sixteen. In 2009, I had the chance to take part in scoring the essays. Every year, ETS hires a vast number of teachers who read and score each essay and short answer question individually. Even in retirement, I still participate in the scoring, as I did a few weeks ago.
With over 450,000 students taking the exam, the scoring task is herculean. Each student answers two essay questions and three short answers—totaling over two million responses. To their credit, ETS puts great emphasis on ensuring that each student is graded fairly, no matter who reads their answers.
Of course, there have been changes in the exam since 1956. The most significant alteration came during the 2014-2015 school year. To be fair, there was at least one good reason for that. When first administered in 1956, the test only included material through the Second World War. By 2014, the exam included significant events like Watergate, the Vietnam War, the Great Society, the Reagan Administration, the end of the Cold War and 9-11. Covering the additional material during the same school term grew more difficult every year. Some teachers, myself included, argued that the course should be split into two courses, as most colleges did.
A Massive Leftward Shift
Instead, the College Board opted to shift from emphasizing historical knowledge to promoting “historiography,” the mechanics of historical analysis. While superficially similar, the two foci are widely disparate. The College Board argued that the ability to use historical information was more important than “simply” possessing information. After all, anybody could look up facts on any computer.
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In effect, the exam swerved toward students’ ability to express uninformed opinions based on a single piece of information.
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) confirmed many teachers’ darkest suspicions. On June 2, 2015—while 1,500 of us labored in Louisville to score essays according to the revised requirements—the NAS released a blistering assessment in the form of a letter to the College Board.
“[W]ith the new 2014 framework, the College Board…repudiates that earlier approach, centralizes control, deemphasizes content, and promotes a particular interpretation of American history. This interpretation downplays American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective…. The new framework is organized around such abstractions as ‘identity,’ ‘peopling,’ ‘work, exchange, and technology,’ and ‘human geography’ while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning, and development of America’s ideals and political institutions, notably the Constitution.”
Higher Grades Mask Failure
With such bad press, the College Board leaped to revise the revisions. Today, they keep tweaking the “framework,” never quite getting it right. After all, few students will become historians, but every citizen should understand American history. Nonetheless, the idea that a history exam should be an exam about history rather than assessing a student’s ability to process historical information still appears elusive.
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When the best students in the country know less and less, what hope do the others have? They are ripe for the indoctrination mills that many universities have become.
Obviously, by increasing the number of top scores so radically, the College Board has not just surrendered to the wave of grade inflation that rips through so much of American education. It is positioning itself at the head of the parade—a procession leading nowhere.
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