Photo Idea: An anonymouss report showing the AP score on a sheet

Word Count: 510

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[NEWS]
Editor: Nathan Choi
AP Score Distributions
By ALEX CHO

Every year, the College Board administers the Advanced Placement tests
internationally. Annually, more than 3.9 million students apply for AP tests and
submit those scores to the college that they want to apply for. Globally, more
than 3600 colleges are accepting AP scores and accepting them as part of a
college credit and an advantage for getting into a better college. AP Scores are
not just an opportunity to prove ones best subjects, but also is an opportunity
for getting into the dream college. They range from 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest
possible score and 5 being the most.

For each AP subjects, many students get different scores. Each student can take
as many AP subjects as they want, but is recommended to take certain amount of
APs for stable grades and a high AP score at the end of the AP course.

Each year, the percentages of students getting a 5 are changing. As the format of
the AP tests change, the score distribution for that subject changes drastically.
For example, in 2011 and 2012, AP Biology had a relatively high percentage of
students getting 5s, between 18 to 19 percent. However, in 2013, when the
format of the test changed more on linking it to math, and applying biology with
other concepts, the number of students getting 5s drastically dropped to 5
percent.

Out of all these AP subjects, AP Chinese had the highest amount of students who
were able to achieve 5 in their exams. With an outstanding 72.3 percent, AP
Chinese was able to the top subject that most students were able to achieve a
high score in 2012. However, statistics in 2013 showed that it dropped
significantly to 27 percent.

AP Chinese was the hardest for me in many reasons, Jae Young Kim (12) said.
The grammar patterns, vocabularies have to be stuck in your head in order to
apply [the language] in sentences.

AP scores are mainly there to make an accurate measuring of a students skill in
a certain subject. Even though AP Chinese had the highest distributions of 5s, this
did not mean that it was challenging for any student that took the AP exam.

Furthermore, Biology was shown to have the least amount of students achieving
5s, with 5.4 percent, closely followed up by World History, which had 5.7 percent
of students achieving 5s. However in 2012, World History had the lowest
distribution of 6.85 percent, slightly higher than that of the most recent scores
back in 2013.

From all these score ranges, many APs vary from one another. One could be
exceptionally challenging, and one could be relatively easy for the majority of
students. However, these AP scores most likely depended on the way the test
was formatted. Looking at the statistics, subjects such as Biology and World
History required a wide range of knowledge and understanding, but also the
ability to apply knowledge and understanding into a proposed situation.