Grade Inflation Sends AP Test Scores Soaring

Plus, Harvard’s new top lawyer; media bias, and more

The College Board has dramatically changed the grading system on the AP tests so fewer students are failing and more are earning top scores. From Marcolearning.com.

A “recalibration” of scores on the AP tests taken by hundreds of thousands of high school students means that this year, the share of students receiving top scores on some of the most commonly taken tests has roughly doubled.

In AP United States Government and Politics, 24.1 percent of the 329,132 students who took the test in 2023 earned a 4 or a 5, the top two scores on the test, which is graded on a 1 to 5 scale. In 2024, that share soared to 49 percent.

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.

Are the high school AP history and government teachers in 2024 twice as good as the teachers in 2023? Are the students twice as smart or twice as hardworking?

Not exactly. The College Board, which administers the tests and charges fees for taking them, says it is “recalibrating” the test scores to match the reality of the grading in the college courses for which the “Advanced Placement” tests can sometimes earn students credit.

High school students who received the higher scores this week were pleased, but not all of them understand that the 4 or 5 scores they got aren’t equal to those earned in previous years, but rather have been devalued.

Not everyone else is pleased. A teacher who flagged the issue in a post for his education company’s website, John Moscatiello, reports, “The lack of transparency about this recalibration project (and the uncertainty about which exams will be recalibrated in which year) has left a lot of teachers confused and frustrated.”

Moscatiello also notes, “The College Board has argued for years that grade inflation is rampant in schools and that objective standards like SAT and Advanced Placement Exams provide a stable measure of student success. But by aligning AP scores to college grades, is the College Board pegging its currency to another currency that is experiencing its own runaway inflation?”

He asks, “Will all of these changes undermine the AP program’s position as the gold standard of rigor in high school education?”

A longtime education policy researcher, Tom Loveless, warned, “AP is undermining its own legitimacy through an opaque recalibration of scores. Sad thing is, if colleges begin doubting AP scores, a lot of working class kids will lose a way to reduce college costs by reducing time-to-degree.”

The AP English Literature, Biology, and Chemistry tests have all gone through similar “recalibrations” in recent years, showing leaping scores. “No matter which way you assess the data—means, medians, modes, 3 or above, 4s and 5s, pre-covid, post-covid—the trend is always the same: AP scores are being deliberately and intentionally increased,” Moscatiello writes.

The College Board has been under pressure from a New York Times reporter, Dana Goldstein, who argued in a 2023 Times front-page news article that too many low-income students were earning low scores on the test. “Some 60 percent of A.P. exams taken by low-income students this year scored too low for college credit — 1 or 2 out of 5 — a statistic that has not budged in 20 years,” Goldstein wrote. “This year, taxpayers paid the nonprofit at least $90 million for A.P. tests that many students failed,” the subheadline on her article complained. “The grueling, multi-hour tests put many low-income students at a disadvantage. Their families have fewer resources to spend on test prep; they may not speak English as a first language; and they may have attended elementary and middle schools that provided less effective preparation,” the Times article said.

In her Times article, Goldstein also made a racial argument: “failure rates were higher for low-income, Black, Hispanic and Native American students.”

In 2023, 52.5 percent of the scores on the U.S. History AP test were failing, while in 2024, 28 percent failed. Likewise, on the AP United States Government and Politics test, in 2023, 50.8 percent of the grades were failing, while in 2024 that failure rate had been reduced to 27 percent. Again, this doesn’t mean that the students in 2024 were learning any more than the students in 2023; it just means that, after the Times published its article complaining about Black, Hispanic, poor and Native American stiudents failing the test, the grading scheme has been recalibrated so that students are passing who in previous years would have failed.

Some analysts are cheering because it means these students can use the AP scores for college credit, and get a college diploma faster and for less money. But if the point is actually learning skills and content rather than shuffling students toward the next meaningless credential that signals no actual achievement or ability, the development is troubling. 

I see it as part of an overall trend of confusing mediocrity with excellence, and of trying to address persistent racial and economic inequality by eliminating standardized testing and merit-based distinctions rather than by improving education and expanding opportunity. It’s less complicated to just give a student a higher grade on a test than it is to do the hard work needed to make sure the student can master the material. But at some point, when tasks that really matter are on the line—a patient on an operating table, an airplane being engineered, a presidential vote being cast in a swing state—the person doing the job needs to really know how to do it.

Biden and the expectations game: With President Biden, as with the students taking the AP tests, absolute performance is a different question from performance exceeding dramatically lowered expectations. It’s a measure of how low expectations were for Biden that today, he mistakenly called President Zelensky President Putin, mistakenly called Vice President Harris Vice President Trump, and talked about how he was pleased that corporate profits are going down, and all in all, a lot of people’s takeaway was and will be that he had a surprisingly strong performance. The good news for Biden is that the worse he’s doing, the lower the bar he has to surmount to exceed expectations. That may be bad news for Democrats who have hopes of replacing him with another candidate before the election, but that’s the political reality at the moment. 

President Biden takes a question from NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid at his press conference.

Recent Work: “Top New York Times Editor Says His Paper Prompted Pause of Arms to Israel” is the headline over my latest column for the Algeminer. Please check out the full column over at the Algemeiner if you are interested in that sort of thing.

“‘Recalcitrant,’ ‘Bellicose,’ ‘Ultranationalist’: New York Times Uses Harsh Labels for Israel — but Not Hamas” is the headline over another recent piece I wrote for the Algemeiner. Please check out the full column over at the Algemeiner if you are interested in that sort of thing.

Harvard’s new top lawyer: In a June 21 New York Sun column, I wrote:

Who is supervising Harvard’s outside lawyers? The position of general counsel at Harvard was once filled by persons of stature. Dan Steiner had the job between 1970 and 1992. His son Joshua is now on the board of Yale. After Mr. Steiner came Margaret Marshall, a partner at Choate, Hall & Stewart who was married to New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis. She later became chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and wrote that court’s decision that made Massachusetts the first state to legalize gay marriage. 

The most recent top internal lawyer at Harvard, Diane Lopez, announced on November 30, 2023, that she would retire at the end of February 2024. Six and a half months since then, Harvard still hasn’t announced a permanent replacement, leaving the university in the hands of an interim vice president and general counsel alongside its interim president and interim provost.

Yesterday, Harvard announced a new vice president and general counsel, to start work July 29: Jennifer O’Connor, a former Obama administration official and former partner at WilmerHale. Harvard’s under fire from Congressional Republicans and sometimes talks about wanting more intellectual vitality and less political activism, more teaching and research; O’Connor is the second former Obama administration official named to a big Harvard job in the past six months, the other being the new Harvard Kennedy School dean.

The WilmerHale angle is something, too. WilmerHale partners include former Harvard Corporation senior fellow William Lee; former Harvard overseer and Clinton administration official Jamie Gorelick; and former Harvard overseer president and Clinton administration official Seth Waxman. If WilmerHale had any worries about losing its lucrative Harvard legal work after losing at the Supreme Court the discrimination case about Asian-Americans in college admissions and then playing a key role in preparing President Claudine Gay for her disastrous appearance before a congressional committee, the firm should be less worried now that it has a former partner in the Harvard general counsel job. 

The current WilmerHale Harvard team, which includes Waxman and Felicia Ellsworth, has been busy trying to convince Judge Richard Stearns that Jewish students suing the university for antisemitism are unreasonable, and that the university is taking the issue seriously. That task has been made more difficult by a new Harvard disciplinary decision to cave to anti-Israel protesters. Harvard student Charlie Covit called the decision to rescind the suspension of one anti-Israel student, Prince Williams, “an enormous failure that bodes awfully for the fall. Prince is a repeat offender — he interrupted an Ec10 class I myself was sitting in with calls for Intifada. Instead of punishing him, Harvard let him set up the encampment. Now he’s off scot-free again.” The House Committee on Education and the Workforce that helped cost Gay her job now says it “wants answers about this asinine decision.”

O’Connor will have her work cut out for her, but lawyers are only as good as their clients. One positive about O’Connor is that her current position is at a defense contractor, Northrop Grumman, and she also was general counsel of the Pentagon. Since one key demand of the Harvard anti-Israel protesters is divestment from the companies making the arms Israel is using to defend itself from the terrorists, the best way to look at this new lawyer for Harvard is that at least she’ll have some knowledge and expertise with which to face down the worst of the mob.

Megan McArdle on media bias: “Liberal media bias is real,” Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle writes. “Because there are 10 times as many Democrats as Republicans in mainstream newsrooms, journalists tended, with a few noble exceptions, to give a Democratic administration trust it didn’t deserve. …the only way to fix it is to add more viewpoint diversity to our newsrooms…When our newsrooms lopsidedly support one party, our readers miss much of the story — in this case, nearly all of it.”

Mulligan on how Trump will fix entitlements: In yesterday’s issue of The Editors, in the post on “Will Trump Tackle the Deficit?”  I noted that Trump’s promise not to cut “one penny” from Social Security or Medicare would make budget progress more difficult. 

A professor of economics at the University of Chicago, Casey Mulligan, who was chief economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers in the first Trump administration, has an opinion piece in the Washington Times adapted from remarks to the Republican platform committee that offers a different perspective, observing that better economic growth would do a lot to improve the budget picture: “An American economy growing at its potential could easily add $1 trillion to the revenue earmarked for Social Security and Medicare,” he writes.

Also: “Housing is especially unaffordable in Democratic-run areas such as Boston and San Francisco due to tremendous obstacles to building. It’s no accident that the same regions have high rates of homelessness. Let me name some of the parts of a house that are more expensive because of President Biden’s federal policies: microwave ovens, conventional ovens, refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, dishwashers, clothes dryers, water heaters, air conditioners, ceiling fans, furnaces, boilers, heat pumps, lamps and light bulbs.”

I’ll be accused of hypocrisy because I was just the other day complaining about the openly anti-Trump economics professor at MIT, Daron Acemoglu. What’s the difference between what Mulligan is doing and what Acemoglu was doing? Mulligan, at least, is sticking to his field of economics and also not foreclosing the possibility of disagreement in the way Acemoglu was. And some of McArdle’s points about lopsidedness and ideological diversity in newsrooms also apply to university faculties. Maybe Mulligan deserves a little more latitude as a rare bird: a professor at an Ivy-plus institution who is helping the Trump Republicans with their platform?

China: Taiwan’s defense ministry announced that 7 Communist chinese vessels and 66 aircraft were detected “operating around Taiwan,” with 56 crossing into Taiwan’s airspace. A retired admiral, James Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander at NATO who is now a vice chair of the Carlyle Group, posted, “With all the attention on President Biden‘s political troubles, we have to consider whether our opponents may try to test the waters. This certainly has that appearance.”

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