The Education Exchange: AP Exams Have Shown a Measurable Decline in Rigor for Years

PAUL PETERSON, HOST: This is the Education Exchange with Paul Peterson. I am the director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. Thank you for joining us. I have a story to tell today about Advanced Placement tests. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an essay for Education Next entitled “The Dumbing Down of Advanced Placement Tests.” In response, the senior vice president at the College Board, the nonprofit that administers the test, accused me in the columns of Education Next of lying. “This is entirely false,” said Trevor Packer. “AP exam questions are not easier than in the past, nor are they harder; the exams themselves have not changed.” Then I received an email from John Moscatiello, a college admissions consultant and an Advanced Placement expert who worked with the Princeton Review before he became active on his own. So, he wrote to me and, he said, this response by Packer is just dishonest. I am pleased today to have John Moscatiello with me today to discuss this topic on the Education Exchange. Thanks, John, for joining me.

JOHN MOSCATIELLO: Thank you for having me.

PETERSON: Well, John, first, let me ask you this question. What is the AP all about? What was its original purpose? How has it changed? How many people take it? How big a deal is the AP?

MOSCATIELLO: The AP program has become a huge deal. It started in the 1950s as a way to connect the advanced work that high school students were doing with undergraduate work. It was a few elite colleges and schools and it was meant for … in the words of one of the early founders of the program, the AP program is predicated on the assumption that not all students are created equal, right? It was meant as an elite, and maybe even an elitist program to allow high school students to take exams in high school that would earn them credit in college. And over the decades, the program grew. By the early 2000s, and even around 2010, the program began to really explode in growth. And so now we’re in a position where what was once this small program connecting elite private high schools and elite universities is kind of everywhere in the education system.

PETERSON: Well, John, that’s all fascinating, but has the Advanced Placement tests been dumbed down then in the process?

MOSCATIELLO: So, I think the short answer is yes. The more precise scholarly definition is that the exams are measurably less rigorous than they once were. And that’s been my interest … that’s why I reached out to you when I saw this kerfuffle online. And I was just shell-shocked by Trevor Packer’s claim that the exams have not changed. They’ve changed in hundreds of ways, almost all of which make the exams easier. And in a way, when we think of that historical context, there’s almost no way you can go from a few thousand exams a year to 6.2 million exams per year for more than 3 million students without there being some sort of watering down of rigor.

PETERSON: I just love one passage in a paper you shared with me, which is taken from Shakespeare’s King Lear. I’m not a Shakespeare actor, I confess, but let me just quote a couple lines here. “Through tattered clothes small vices do appear. / Riches and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold.” Now, that’s a very contemporary passage. That’s a passage for our time. This is about billionaires and trillionaires and ordinary people. It is the affordability question we talk about every day. Do we have questions like that on the Advanced Placement test today?

MOSCATIELLO: No, the passage you’re reading from is from the very AP English Language exam I took as a junior in high school in the year 2000. You have to imagine me, 17 years old, hunched over a piece of paper, having to arm wrestle that passage from King Lear to figure out what does it mean to plate sin with gold? And what does …  the prompt was about the relationship between wealth and justice. Today’s prompts are about selfies. They’re about the word “overrated.” They’re about perfectionism. They have the advantage of being relevant. Maybe they reflect a shift in college work. Maybe people are spending less time on Shakespeare and more time on selfies. But there is a gap between the year 2000, when I took the exam, and the exam today. No, they would never put a question like that on today’s exam.

PETERSON: Well, here you have a quote from a question that was asked in 2025. It was a tennis player saying that she has been priortoris- … priortoris- … I can’t even pronounce this word … prioritizing trying to live in the moment and enjoy the journey. And students are asked to say whether that’s a valid viewpoint or not. Is that comparable to the King Lear quote I just gave you?

MOSCATIELLO: I think obviously not, right? I mean, you don’t need to be an expert in tests. I’ve spent the last 24 years helping students on tests. I’ve never left this world of tests. You don’t need that kind of expertise to see that. It’s a plain difference. What my research has consistently uncovered is, as we get more scholarly and we get more precise about this, we can see the passages are newer. The sentences are shorter. The words are simpler. The ideas are simpler. There are 650,000 kids in America who take this AP English Language exam every year. 650,000. It’s the number one AP exam in the program. And the shift in our culture, in schools, the culture at large, and these tests … maybe the shift in culture is perfectly reflected in the tests, right? You couldn’t give this … the old King Lear prompt. And you have this thing that I think is measurably easier. One other example I had put on X, formerly Twitter, was comparing the 2001 prompt to the 2024 prompt. Both are about photography. One is 350 words from Susan Sontag about the epistemology of the study of human knowledge and how photography threatens our memory, versus a quote from the New York Times about selfies. And that’s kind of what we’re living in, is that we’ve assumed that Advanced Placement has been immune to these kinds of changes, this decline in rigor, but it’s a perfect picture of it.

PETERSON: Well, of course, these are anecdotes, and we’ll be accused of cherry picking. But you also show a graph in the paper you shared with me that shows where the reading level of a passage is on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. Can you tell our listeners what the Flesch-Kincaid scale is?

MOSCATIELLO: Yeah, so there’s about seven of these different ones. Flesch-Kincaid is one. Lexile levels is a really common one. That’s the one the College Board uses. And the goal of these readability metrics is to measure how much easier to read a passage is.  It looks at things like sentence length and number of syllables per word, more sophisticated models will account for that kind of language complexity, but you’re right, this could all just be anecdotes, and King Lear versus a tennis player’s quote can miss the actual measurable decline. The readability metrics show us how difficult the passages are.

PETERSON: So, this measure you show dropped by two grade point levels, from about a sophomore college level back in 2000 down to about a high school level,11th grade or 12th grade high-school level, in 2025. You take that as a pretty good indicator of the seriousness of the decline.

MOSCATIELLO: Yeah, and actually, I think that when you smooth out the averages, it’s actually about four-grade levels dropped. So anecdotally, you can look at a prompt … and these are, by the way … what we’re measuring here is not the prompts readability, but the stimulus reading passages. In a lot of AP exams, especially in history or in English, you’re given passages that you have to respond to with no preparation. Here’s an excerpt from a letter from Jonathan Swift in which he is torturing you with 45 word-long sentences and everything, every other word’s capitalized, and these words come from Latin and Greek. That’s something that could have appeared 20, 25 years ago. Today’s passages tend to come from newspapers: shorter sentences, shorter words. So that drop is not just, oh, wow, I can look at these different passages anecdotally and see the difference. No, it’s measurable. It’s consistent. And, we are now multiple grade levels lower with these simple informational passages. They’re more like the kind of Common Core articles and texts that kids digest in high school than these really difficult passages from your Miltons, your Shakespeares, your Jonathan Swifts, or even just a dense early 20th-century writer. Those passages are mostly gone on these tests.

PETERSON: Well, the AP says you pass the exam if you get a 3 on a five-point scale. If you get a 1 or a 2, you don’t pass. If you get a 3, 4, 5, you do pass. What I’ve shown is that even in the last five years on the most popular exams, on average, the percentage passing rates jumped from 50 percent to 70 percent. That’s a 20-percentage point change. Is there any way of explaining how that could happen if they weren’t making the test easier?

MOSCATIELLO: The way that Trevor Packer attempts to explain it in the article is by saying, “Well, you know, we did this new methodology, the evidence-based scoring system, and we found that, you know, some exams went up and some exams went down.” That’s actually also misleading, right? Fourteen of the exams have been recalibrated on this metric, and they’ve all gone up. The ones that he says, you know … There are some … So some exams, these pass rates have gone down, quote unquote, by one to two points. But they have moved as many exams as they could firmly into this pass rate of 60 to 80 percent. In theory, there could be a planet in which it’s true that readjusting the scoring just so happened to move 800,000 to a million exams every year into passing territory without a decline in rigor, without any kind of dumbing down. On this planet, they’re easier.

PETERSON: Well, of course, we have a lot of other data that suggests that kids are not learning more. I mean, Covid had a huge impact. All the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that high school kids are less well prepared to go to college today than they were before Covid. Undoubtedly, I mean, there’s just … the PISA test shows the same thing worldwide. It’s sort of totally implausible that there’s been a transformation of our educational system that has produced amazing results without the tests having been readjusted.

MOSCATIELLO: Yeah, in fact, framed like that, Professor Peterson, AP is the outlier. Every other test result seems to be going down. And this one shot up. It shot up also at a moment as it drafted more and more students into the program. You and I have both talked about revenue being a component of this. It’s not as simple as … There’s thousands of people who work on the AP exam committees who grade the exams. They didn’t just sit around one day and say, How do we get money out of this?” But it’s become a half a billion-dollar revenue stream for the College Board. Every student who takes the exam, that’s $99 an exam now. Very many states will sponsor this. This is tens of millions of dollars a year in public money. The program has gotten huge and scores are going down. There are critiques of the College Board. Why are so many kids failing AP exams? And now we’re in a moment when the scores have shot up against all of these trends—against both the post-Covid decline and the surge in growth of the program. Because I think all of us who have interacted with the AP program can imagine that adding more and more students … They got all the really smart kids into the program early. What they’re doing is expanding out to as many class sections as they can fit into a school. It’s an extraordinary exception.

PETERSON: Well, John, let me ask you exactly how they make it an easier test. You had in the paper you shared with me a list of different ways that you could make a test more accessible, simpler, and so forth. And we’ve talked about some of them, but there’s several techniques that they have been using. What are some of those techniques?

MOSCATIELLO: And again, some of them quite intentional, like the score inflation that we’re talking about, this recalibration, that’s one of the obvious ones. And some are more subtle. My argument is, every aspect of the program has become easier. You can start with the curricular standards. There’s about 40 AP exams. They all have these course and exam descriptions, booklets that tell teachers, here’s what you should do in your class; here’s what’s on the test. Those standards have been reduced in terms of their content. They’ve rolled out new AP courses that are simpler. AP Computer Science Principles is a simpler, in the words of the College Board, a “gentler introduction” to computer science. You have reduced standards, simpler exams, and then you can go through the exams chronologically. The multiple choice questions—they no longer have a guessing penalty. That could be a defensible choice psychometrically, maybe guessing penalties don’t really test anything. You go from five choices to four choices on multiple choice. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easier. The passages in multiple choice get simpler. There’s more scaffolding, more formula sheets, more calculators. That alone doesn’t prove that it’s simpler. But you keep going, you keep stacking it on, one by one. The free-response questions have more … They’re easier questions. They cover broader periods. They’re graded on simpler rubrics with simpler scores at the end. So from the beginning of the course design to the final scoring at the end, every single part of the course and test, tests less content, with more time, fewer constraints, more supports, and easier, more generous scoring. And so for me, to read that the AP exams have not changed, “they’re neither easier nor harder,” for Trevor Packer to say that, I mean, he’s been in charge of the program for a decade and a half. This is his work. He has presided over a program that has made hundreds of changes to make AP exams easier.

PETERSON: So why? You’ve already said it is to make money and so on. But how about Common Core? Is that part of the story?

MOSCATIELLO: David Coleman, who is the CEO of the College Board, is the architect of Common Core. I think that’s part of it. I think money … Again, one of the unusual, good things about the AP program is that the exam committees that design the exams, the course development committees, the hundreds of thousands of teachers who grade the AP exams—it’s just like layers and layers of all these committees of thousands of people—they don’t wake up one day and say like, “We’re going to dumb these exams down this year.” But they are, like me, and like you—I’ve taught at the university level, high school, middle school—we’re all navigating a changing world with our students, and we have to make choices about how many pages we think they can handle in the reading on the syllabus this week, about what counts as passing for my course. And those very people, the thousands and tens of thousands of us educators who’ve presided over a lowering of standards have little by little done this. What do you do? And here’s an example. There are more than half a million kids in America who take the AP U.S. History exam. I have read AP U.S. History responses from students, high school students, that talked about how the Great Depression caused the Civil War. Now, when half of the students are at that level, literally half of the people taking AP exams, can’t write more than a paragraph or two in response to these prompts or can’t connect, make an argument that’s valid, do you try to find the best you can and try to distinguish it so you make a nice curve? Or do you just keep failing 250,000 kids on the exam? And I think the College Board made the choice to stop failing 50 percent of kids and fail 30 percent. But, you know, so there’s a lot more to say there, but I think it’s the confluence of these factors. There’s financial incentives. There’s committees of people like me who are well-intentioned and have to adapt with the times, and no particular incentive for anyone to hold onto rigor.

PETERSON: So, here’s a question I have for you. Okay, maybe it’s got to happen. Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe it’s a reflection of our times. Maybe it is an effort to reach out to a broader segment of the population. Maybe it is to make sure that the AP survives this whole thing, because maybe the AP does a lot of good things. And so maybe it’s got to change in order to continue to do that. But, why do you have to lie about it? What is the reason why Mr. Packer feels a need to deny that it is changing when it’s obviously changing, when all you have to do is open your eyes? Your lying eyes are telling you it’s changing and you’re being told that’s a lie. Why is that required?

MOSCATIELLO: I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t know the motives of the College Board or what their strategy for communication was here. I think it puts them in a really difficult position if they have to admit the bar is lower. Because the whole argument for Advanced Placement in the last five to 10 years has been, well, there’s grade inflation in colleges, and there’s grade inflation in high schools, there’s dual enrollment, sometimes called concurrent enrollment, where students in their high-school class can earn credit for completing that course, but there’s no exam at the end. So the market requires this specialness about Advanced Placement. They can’t … They feel … They must feel—I have to ask him—they must feel that they can’t concede this ground. Especially when somebody like you from an instituion like Harvard is saying, you know, I have doubts about this. That’s really going to catch their attention. This is a story, that if it blew up, if it really became a national discussion, could unravel a lot of credibility in the AP program. One other data point here that’s critical is there’s something like 30 states in America that have credit policies from their state institutions that guarantee credits for AP exams. Pick a state of the union, Oklahoma or wherever, probably has an agreement where if a student earns a 3 or higher on an AP exam, the public universities of that state must grant credit for those scores. That’s a key … It’s now baked into the law it’s baked into the system. So truly so much is at stake. If the public discovered just how much AP exams have been simplified, it could be a big problem.

PETERSON: So that’s a fascinating point. But maybe they don’t quite say that it hasn’t eased a bit in its seriousness and its demanding qualities, but they say it wasn’t intentional. It was an accident. Because I noticed there’s a lot of emphasis on the word: “We’ve never changed the test intentionally. Any changes happened by happenstance.” Is that a convincing claim?

MOSCATIELLO: I think there is … Again, the title of that article was “AP Exams Are As Rigorous As Ever.” The quote literally says, “They’re not easier or harder. They’re not even different,” which, that was a huge error on the part of the College Board, because name one difference, I can name 30 right now, and it disproves that. The intentional thing can work, because again, AP exams, it’s really a community. AP teachers are great teachers. The professors who work on the committees are great. And at their best, the AP program is fantastic. I graduated from college a full year early. I was 20 years old when I graduated college because I had AP credits. So, you know, I’ve loved the program for many years. And because the various committees separately make their decisions … The AP Chemistry people are in kind of a different planet from the AP World History people, who are in their own world from the AP Spanish Language people. And, separately, those committees can have all drifted. But, the College Board is a centralized enough organization that they could have prevented this. So I think that this, “We didn’t mean it that way” explanation could maybe work. Or what they normally do is, again, wave around psychometrics, which nobody knows anything about, and then we have to say, well, there’s the science, the science made me do it. The science made me raise the scores by 20 percent, or the science made me give away points very generously at the readings, or give newspaper articles instead of really challenging texts.

PETERSON: Well, I do know that my own university, Harvard University, is now trying to do something to stop grade inflation. I also know that there’s been a steady increase in the number of A’s given at Harvard and the disappearance of the C, so that now if you give a B+, students get extremely upset because that’s almost equivalent to a failing grade, as it’s perceived by many students. Harvard’s saying, OK, we’ve got to do something about it. But they would say also, well, this all happened accidentally. I don’t think Harvard’s quite said that. They haven’t said that publicly. You do hear that talk. Oh, somehow it’s creeping. This stuff is creeping, as if it’s like a cat in the night. So how can this kind of thing happen and people not be aware of it? I mean, if they’re not doing anything to stop it, then they must be accepting it.

MOSCATIELLO: The awareness thing is critical. You have people like me who took AP exams 25 years ago, and I’m unusual because I kept sticking around AP exams all these years; most people move on to a life beyond this. And then when their own children come through the system, they maybe discover how different things are today. Most people don’t care about Flesch-Kincaid readability of passages on AP exams. That’s one way that you deal with this. But what you’re talking about is a cultural creep. The way that something in the air changes and students feel different. The people who know this the best are veteran AP teachers. The people who taught me 25 years ago who are still teaching and who can see the difference. Well, one thing too is once you create a culture at Harvard or in the AP program, where everyone gets an A, or everyone gets a 4 or 5, then you and I become the fuddy-duddies who are saying, maybe not everyone should get an A. Maybe not everyone should graduate high school. Maybe not everyone should be in the AP program. And, that starts to sound elitist or even racist to people. What is a way of saying, no, I want everyone to have a fair shot at excellence? But excellence isn’t attendance. Excellence isn’t for everyone by definition. So, you know, the advanced question, the real question that this would scare the College Board quite a lot is, is the AP program just too big? And, the answer, of course, is yes. There’s too many kids in the AP program who are not ready. They’ve not been given the skills. They don’t live in a culture that can prepare them for it, and so they’ve accommodated it. I don’t know how you fix … When the culture, when the water all around you has changed, like it has at Harvard, where the expectations of students are different. Parents, the activities of professors are different, there’s new generations of educators coming in. How do you fix a culture? I’m not exactly sure.

PETERSON: Well, you know, we are searching for some standards, some measurements, some scale that isn’t changing, that is constant, so that we can sort of find something to stand on. It’s because if everything is water, if everything is moving, if the sand is constantly shifting, then we don’t really know where we stand anymore. And the consequences … And we sort of felt that, okay, the AP is that. The AP claims to be that. A lot of people sort of feel that that is what it is. So, it’s true of the SAT, too. We haven’t dug into that, but the SAT and the AP are supposed to be … at least we’ve got something to hang onto that gives us some assurance that we have standards left. But maybe we don’t.

MOSCATIELLO: Again, AP is not the exception to the rule of this decline in rigor. It is the perfect picture of it. And that’s a story that I think the American public needs to have. I’m a parent now and I’m reflecting on this as an experienced educator and a new parent. What are the tough things for my daughter to go through—the difficult experiences, the not winning at her whatever event, not getting an A on the assignment—that are actually good for her? That hurt to watch. It hurts for these students to get Bs and Cs in classes when they’ve never been anywhere near that. It hurts to run into that, to have to climb over that really high wall, but you’re so much stronger when you do. The College Board just kind of knocked down the wall brick by brick, took it apart and is just letting people just, not have to … build the muscle they need to climb.

PETERSON: Well, it’s easy for us to sit here and condemn, but what would we do about it? What do you think we should do, John?

MOSCATIELLO: I think the College Board needs to reveal … release an honest and realistic assessment of what has happened to AP exams. Talk about the differences. I think they need to allow for third-party research. They’ll produce their own reports and data and quote unquote research and things. What about giving—AP US History ostensibly hasn’t really changed that much—what if we gave students the exam from 2010 or 2005 versus the 2025 one and compare the results? That will never happen from the College Board because the results would be devastating. The vast majority of kids who are passing AP exams would be at risk, would get a lower score. And a big swath of them wouldn’t even pass today. We need that objective research. And then I think among school leaders, there’s been an incentive to grow AP programs. If you Google around on Google News for headlines about AP, our program doubled in size. The students have higher scores than ever. All of that is misleading just because the program got bigger, doesn’t mean it got better. And just because scores are up, doesn’t mean they haven’t been inflated. So we need, at a school district level, at the state level, an assessment of are these programs worth keeping at this 7X scale? Or should they go to the right kinds of students? And again, this is not about class or race or anything else. But the students who have the drive, who have the ability to succeed, on the tests as they’re written. That also is impossible for the College Board to accept. I don’t … Again, they’re not strictly motivated by money, but you can’t go from $500 million a year in revenue to $250 million a year and survive as a program. It is unimaginable to me, unless we have a really serious national reckoning with AP, to see how that happens. There’s just a lot of vested interest in keeping it as oversized as it is now.

PETERSON: Well, how about a congressional committee? That brings this topic to the attention of the public at large.

MOSCATIELLO: Yeah, and certainly at the state-by-state level that controls this, too. The state legislatures, who automatically grant credit, the professors and the admissions committees who are relying on these numbers. Think about this, in the year 2000, when I took AP English Language, there were about 10,000 kids who got a 5 on the AP exam. When I applied to college, I had my 5 on AP English Language. Pretty small group of us relative to the broader population. There’s now something like, what, 90,000 students, 85,000 students who have a 5 on the AP English Language exam. The College Board is doing something good for buoying the program, but terrible for the credibility of this. What should state legislatures do with these 800,000 more exams per year that pass. Congress, the state and local officials, and certainly universities. And then I think, again, the transparency needed from the College Board to show us the science on how these things that look like four grade levels of decline in reading, that look like obvious relaxing of standards, are not what they are. I’m not optimistic.

PETERSON: Well, John, you have done one thing. You have brought this issue to public attention. You pointed this problem out in a number of essays that you’ve written over the years. And I’m very grateful that you have joined me on the Education Exchange. Thank you very much.

MOSCATIELLO: Thank you for having me.

PETERSON: I have been speaking with John Moscatiello, a college admissions consultant who is an expert on the Advanced Placement exam. Thank you for joining me. I am Paul Peterson. This is the Education Exchange. Please join me every Monday at noon when our weekly podcast is released on the Education Next website.