College Board no longer disclosing AP test results by ethnicity, state

Higher Ed Dive

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf

July 8, 2022

The College Board used to annually publish granular breakdowns of how students scored on its Advanced Placement, or AP exams. And Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University, would painstakingly download each data set to translate into a more digestible format on his admissions blog.

The testing provider’s reports represented an in-depth dive into the assessments, which can earn K-12 students college credit if they receive a high enough score.

The College Board would share a state-by-state look at how high school students performed on the tests, as well as demographic data, so anyone in the public could see how students — based on their ethnicity — fared. So detailed were these summaries that one could look, for instance, Black students’ average score on the AP Biology test up for any given year.

That was up until 2021, when the College Board stopped releasing most of those data points. It still posts the number of students who tested, and how many scored in exams’ range of 1 to 5, a 5 being the highest mark. But the public could no longer sort test results by ethnicity.

Higher Ed Dive could find no evidence the College Board announced the change. It also appears to have scrubbed that type of data from its website archives.

It was a conspicuous absence to Boeckenstedt, one of Twitter’s most prolific admissions professionals. In February, he called out the College Board on the social media platform, urging his followers to tell the company to once again publish the data and arguing that walking it back did not match its professed commitment to transparency.

He reiterated his call this week as the College Board began to share top-level information on 2022 AP scores.

Continue Reading