At worst, you’re out $500. At best, you get into your dream school and knock $10,000 off the bill.
That’s the wager presented to students taking the Advanced Placement exams, a series of tests for college-bound kids that count toward course credits at many US universities. The exams — long known for their rigor — have become markedly easier to pass, making it more feasible for pupils to cut their future tuition bills by thousands of dollars at a time when the cost of college is under intense scrutiny.
College Board, the non-profit behind the tests, has changed its scoring practices across nine exams in recent years. It swapped old-school expert panels for data-driven technology which, in its words, measures students’ competence in areas spanning world history, microeconomics and literature “with more precision than ever before.”
The upshot: of the millions of students who take AP exams every year, hundreds of thousands more may now nab passing scores. The exact effect depends on where a student chooses to go to college, but it ranges from boosting their chances of getting into a selective school to directly reducing their future debt load.
“AP exams are an easier pathway to earning college credits and now are a huge mover of helping to alleviate these costs for students at a time when college tuition has increased dramatically,” said John Moscatiello, founder of Marco Learning, a test prep company. “Over the next decade these choices of College Board will add up to tens of thousands of dollars saved for students.”
More Credits
The opportunity could keep growing. College Board has said it will be revising scoring standards for five more subjects including environmental science, a physics course and its English language test.
In 2023, nearly three million students took a little over five million AP exams, according to College Board data. That’s an average of 1.8 exams taken per student. Each test costs about $100 and some students are eligible for a fee reduction.
Compare that to the cost of taking a college course. It varies widely, but the Education Data Initiative pegs the average cost for a full-blown class at around $1,200.
Most US colleges offer some sort of credit for students who take the exams and get a passing score — a three or higher on a scale of one to five. As of last year, at least 35 states had statewide AP credit policies, which typically require its public colleges to award credit for passing exam scores. The calculus is a little different for top private schools: at Dartmouth and Yale, for example, most AP courses result in credit toward graduation only if a student scores a four or a five on the test.
Benefits Vary
Depending on a university’s policies, AP test scores could count as credits toward graduation and or fulfill specific course requirements. At the University of Michigan, for example, students who took the English literature or language tests can get credits toward graduation but still have to fulfill their first-year writing requirements, said Perry Fittrer, assistant dean for undergraduate education and student affairs at Michigan’s college of literature, science and the arts. On the other hand, language-specific exams like Spanish can stand in for entire courses.
Fittrer says some students could knock off at least a semester’s worth of classes if they are strategic. Passing five AP exams — and paying $500 in test fees — could result in something like $10,000 in savings for a local student and more than $30,000 for an out-of-state pupil.
Taking AP classes can also result in financial benefits that are hard to quantify, said Rick Clark, who works in enrollment management at Georgia Tech. Students who take more AP courses may look more competitive on their applications, potentially leading to scholarships. That’s especially true now as standardized testing requirements are shifting.
“I think there's a lot of value to students to just know, yes, you can save money at least at certain places, and sometimes very significant dollars, on dollars for the test versus dollars for tuition,” said Clark. “I also think that it's good for students to know, having ‘good APs’ also has increasing value in a landscape and an ecosystem in higher education where around 80% of four year schools are test optional.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.