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How AP College Comparability Studies Affect AP Grades for Foreign Language Exams
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| | As a means of assessing how successful AP courses and exams are in preparing high school students for advanced study at the post-secondary level and to ensure that the performance level required to earn each AP grade reflects the standards and practice of colleges and universities, the AP Program conducts college grade comparability studies every five to seven years. In a comparability study, a recent or current AP Exam is administered to students enrolled in courses that closely parallel the AP subject courses at colleges and universities that receive a large number of AP grades in that subject. The students take the exam at or near the end of their course and are motivated to perform well on the exam because the results count for a portion of their course grade. Besides administering and grading the exams, the college instructors provide the AP Program with a course grade and an exam grade for each of their students. The free-response sections are then sent to the AP Reading where they are scored, and composite scores are created for the college students by combining scores on the multiple-choice and free-response sections.
Recent Studies of the AP Foreign Language Exams
Over the past two academic years, college comparability studies have been conducted on the three AP foreign language exams: French Language, German Language, and Spanish Language. It was vital to ensure that the participating colleges and universities offered similarly rigorous courses in all three languages, and administered the exam at the equivalent course level. As a result, college students taking third-year foreign language courses at the following institutions participated in the study by administering one or more of the AP foreign language exams:
Barnard College
Baylor University
Brandeis University
Brown University
California State Polytechnic University
Carnegie-Mellon University
Dartmouth College
Dickinson College
Georgetown University
Georgia Tech University
North Carolina State University
Santa Clara University
University of California-Berkeley
University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana
University of Illinois-Chicago
University of Pennsylvania
University of Southern California
University of South Carolina
University of Texas-Austin
University of Virginia
SUNY-Stony Brook
Washington University
Wellesley College
Wheaton College
Standard and Non-Standard Groups
At the beginning of each foreign language exam, AP students are asked two background questions. The first asks students whether they have lived or studied for one month or more in a country where the language of the exam is spoken; the second asks whether they regularly speak or hear the language of the exam at home. Students who respond with the answer "no" to each of these questions are denoted as the "standard-group students." What follows is a brief explanation of how the college comparability data affected the percentage of those standard-group students who earned AP grades of 3 to 5 in 2002.
How College Comparability Data Were Used
Statistical analyses relating the performance of the college students on the AP Exam to their institution-provided grades was used in selecting the 2002 "cut points" (i.e., the minimum composite score required to earn a particular AP grade). The lowest composite score receiving an AP grade of 5 was set at the point which best approximated the performance of the average college student who received a grade of A. The lowest composite score receiving an AP grade of 4 was set at the point which best approximated the performance of the average college student who received a grade of B. Similar logic was used to set the lowest composite scores for AP grades of 3 and 2.
The study resulted in changes to the AP grading standards for each of the three foreign language exams:
- In AP Spanish Language, the cut points used to determine the AP grades of 3, 4, and 5 were increased by five points on the 180-point scale for the 2002 exam. As a result, in 2002, three to four percent fewer of the standard-group students than in 2001 received AP grades of 3 or higher and 4 or higher.
- In AP German Language, the cut points used to determine the AP grades of 3, 4, and 5 were decreased by 10 to 14 points on the 200-point scale for the 2002 exam. This resulted in seven percent more standard-group students than in 2001 receiving grades of 4 or higher than in 2001, and four percent more standard-group students than in 2001 receiving grades of 3 or higher.
- In AP French Language, the cut points used to determine the AP grades of 3 and 4 were decreased by three points on the 160-point scale for the 2002 exam. This resulted in three percent more standard-group students than in 2001 receiving grades of 3 or higher and 4 or higher.
The AP Program would like to thank the college and university instructors who participated in these college comparability studies. It is only through their cooperation that it was possible to simultaneously evaluate the grading standards for the three exams. These will not be the last college comparability studies conducted for the AP foreign language exams. Nevertheless, for the next several years the cut points that determine the AP grades in French Language, German Language, and Spanish Language will reflect the standards suggested by these studies.
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