Skip to main content

COVID and AP Scores

Every year, The College Board releases summaries of the prior year's AP program.  While I've visualized these before (here and here), I've been unwilling to update the visualizations or do longitudinal analysis, for a couple of reasons:  First, the data are in multiple tables in multiple spreadsheets, and they are so heavily formatted for printing that scraping the data out of them is quite a burden.  Second, of course, is that the scores don't change a lot from one year to the next.

That is, until 2020, when COVID completely turned the world of higher education upside down.  I was interested in seeing how much scores changed from prior years.  As you can see, the changes are interesting, if not completely surprising.

By the way, if you enjoy Higher Ed Data Stories and use it in your work, you can support the web hosting and other costs associated with producing the content by Buying Me A Coffee, here.  If you're a high school teacher or counselor, just ignore and read on for free.

In the past I've been critical of the College Board, and I thought they should have cancelled the tests in 2020, notwithstanding the loss of opportunity it would have meant for thousands of students. And the test results seem to suggest the product in 2020 was not up to snuff.  And, to no one's surprise, the students we thought would be most affected by the pandemic were, in fact, apparently most affected by the pandemic.

A couple of notes about the data: The breakouts of public and private school students are estimates, based on subtracting the public school data from the overall data (the assumption being all schools are either public or private, but not accounting, of course, for home-schooled students, who are most likely in the latter category.)  I've also grouped a few subject exams together (Spanish Literature with Spanish Literature and Culture, and others where there was an apparent name change that may have included some content.)  I used the ethnicity labels College Board supplied, and I kept the awkward ALL CAPS labels on the exams, because well, if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me.

And finally, let's remember a lot of things come with race/ethnicity, and school types that are not measured in this data: Income, parental attainment, opportunity, and student investment.  Don't jump to easy conclusions about what you see here. (And send a note to College Board and ask them to provide this data in more granular and detailed formats, so we can show that, too.)

These views are all very straightforward, and don't require a lot of explanation.  The last view, however, does break scores into two chunks: A weighted average of 2017--2019, and 2020, so you can see the comparisons of before and after (during COVID).

As always, let me know what you see here.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Changes in AP Scores, 2022 to 2024

Used to be, with a little work, you could download very detailed data on AP results from the College Board website: For every state, and for every course, you could see performance by ethnicity.  And, if you wanted to dig really deep, you could break out details by private and public schools, and by grade level.  I used to publish the data every couple of years. Those days are gone.  The transparency The College Board touts as a value seems to have its limits, and I understand this to some extent: Racists loved to twist the data using single-factor analysis, and that's not good for a company who is trying to make business inroads with under-represented communities as they cloak their pursuit of revenue as an altruistic push toward access. They still publish data, but as I wrote about in my last post , it's far less detailed; what's more, what is easily accessible is fairly sterile, and what's more detailed seems to be structured in a way that suggests the company doesn...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Highly Rejective Colleges

If you're not following Akil Bello on Twitter, you should be.  His timeline is filled with great insights about standardized testing, and he takes great effort to point out racism (both subtle and not-so-subtle) in higher education, all while throwing in references to the Knicks and his daughter Enid, making the experience interesting, compelling, and sometimes, fun. Recently, he created the term " highly rejective colleges " as a more apt description for what are otherwise called "highly selective colleges."  As I've said before, a college that admits 15% of applicants really has a rejections office, not an admissions office.  The term appears to have taken off on Twitter, and I hope it will stick. So I took a look at the highly rejectives (really, that's all I'm going to call them from now on) and found some interesting patterns in the data. Take a look:  The 1,132 four-year, private colleges and universities with admissions data in IPEDS are incl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Changes in SAT Scores after Test-optional

One of the intended consequences of test-optional admission policies at some institutions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was to raise test scores reported to US News and World Report.  It's rare that you would see a proponent of test-optional admission like me admit that, but to deny it would be foolish. Because I worked at DePaul, which was an early adopter of the approach (at least among large universities), I fielded a lot of calls from colleagues who were considering it, some of whom were explicit in their reasons for doing so.  One person I spoke to came right out at the start of the call: She was only calling, she said, because her provost wanted to know how much they could raise scores if they went test-optional. If I sensed or heard that motivation, I advised people against it.  In those days, the vast majority of students took standardized admission tests like the SAT or ACT, but the percentage of students applying without tests was still relatively small; the ne...
Post a Comment
Read more