The College Board’s Advanced Placement tests for high school students to earn college credit by taking a detailed test on a single subject such as Chemistry or U.S. History haven’t been as controversial as its SAT college admission test, partly because nobody knows how big the racial gaps are.
Eyeballing this graph from a pre-COVID blog from Higher Ed Data Stories, it looks like Asians earn about 25 times as many 5s (the highest score) on AP and whites about 10 times as many per capita as blacks. You can take multiple tests, and it’s not uncommon nowadays for good students to take double digits of AP tests over their four years in high school.)
And the College Board is determined to maintain that state of happy ignorance. From Inside Higher Education:
College Board Will Not Make Public AP Data by Race
Scott Jaschik
July 11, 2022The College Board will no longer make public data on race and the scores of those who take Advanced Placement exams.
The change was first noted by Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University, who wrote on Twitter that the change was “the most 1984-esque example of College Board-speak I’ve seen in a while” because the College Board says “withholding data is now called ‘streamlined reporting.’”
Note that this was a business decision by the College Board to avoid having the AP canceled like the SAT/ACT has been cancelled by the U. of California due to racial gaps.
It’s hard to predict whether data will increasingly disappear like this. It probably depends upon whether racial activists think its being available helps them shake down institutions more, or not.
