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The History of the AP Program
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by Robert DiYanni
The College Board
New York, New York
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The Origins of AP
The story of AP begins in 1951 at Kenyon College, whose faculty held discussions about the prospect of allowing strong secondary school students to begin working toward a liberal arts degree before formally matriculating in college. The idea gained momentum with the formation of the Committee on Admission with Advanced Standing, which was financed with a small grant from the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Advancement of Education. The committee consisted of representatives from 12 U.S. colleges and universities: Bowdoin, Brown, Carleton, Haverford, Kenyon, MIT, Middlebury, Oberlin, Swarthmore, Wabash, Wesleyan, and Williams. It was soon enlarged to include 12 secondary school representatives -- headmasters, principals, and school superintendents -- and its name changed to the Central Committee of the School and College Study (Cornog 1956, 3).
Three basic assumptions guided the committee's work:
- Able students in the American secondary schools system were not well enough served academically -- for the able student, the American system "wastes time."
- The best place for adolescents is in the secondary school.
- The best teachers for adolescents are secondary school teachers (Cornog 1956, 3).
Concurrent with the work of the Central Committee was a project led by Alan R. Blackmer, an English teacher at Andover, that included representatives from Andover, Exeter, Lawrenceville, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Their focus was on determining how to gain the most pedagogical value from the last two years of secondary school and the first two years of university. Their final report, General Education in School and College, published by the Harvard University Press in 1952, identified a central weakness in the U.S. educational system: a failure of schools and colleges to view their jobs as parts of a continuous process -- "two halves of a common enterprise" (General Education 1952, 8). One consequence of the educational disconnect between high school and college was that academically able students were made to repeat, at the university level, much of what they had learned in secondary school, thereby suffering "a serious loss of academic momentum" (Rothschild 1995, 26).
The most far-reaching and influential of the committee's recommendation was that secondary school students take college-level courses at their schools in their senior year. The report recommended specifically that a set of examinations be given in several subjects to "enable the colleges supporting these examinations to give an entering student advanced placement in a subject like... chemistry... or credit for the prerequisite to majoring in history..." (General Education 1952, 118). With the articulation of this idea, the seeds of what would soon become the Advanced Placement Program were sown.
Setting the Standards
What made it possible for colleges to provide credit for students who had taken advanced courses in high school was an examination calibrated to the standard of the first-year university course. The standard was set by a group of subcommittees working in disciplines in which examinations were being offered: English composition, literature, Latin, French, German, Spanish, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics. (History, a subject included in the committee discussions, would prove to be a more complicated case, but it was offered with an examination soon after.)
Examinations were developed during the 1953-54 academic year with the assistance of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which also administered the exams. All exams were three hours long, with other aspects left up to the subject committees. The English and Latin exam development committees used only essay questions; the foreign language committees relied heavily on essays but also included objective questions to assess listening proficiency. The mathematics and science committees employed a combination of free-response and objective questions in their assessments (Valentine 1987, 84).
The examinations were administered in May 1954 to high school seniors at the cooperating secondary schools and to freshmen at the 12 participating universities. The anonymous exam performances were assessed by committees of readers, with the scores of secondary school candidates compared by ETS with those of the college participants. This kind of comparability study, which ETS conducted for these initial precursors to the soon-to-be-administered AP Exams, would later become a hallmark of AP assessment analysis and validation.
The College Board Assumes Control of AP
The College Board officially offered its first Advanced Placement Program Examinations in May 1956, having taken over the existing pilot study at the request of the participating institutions. From the beginning, the AP Program was seen as an opportunity for well-prepared students to demonstrate their proficiency in discrete subject areas. There was no guarantee that colleges would offer credit for such demonstrations, though there was a clear sense that students should be exempt from preliminary courses and accelerated into appropriate advanced courses as demonstrated by their performance on the AP Examinations.
Williams College history professor Charles R. Keller took the helm as the first director of what was dubbed the College Board's Advanced Placement Program. Keller, a passionate advocate, was instrumental in convincing colleges of the program's strengths: he emphasized the soundness of the Course Descriptions and the stringency of the exams, the majority of which were in essay form. The program began receiving resources and support from the Education Commissioner of New York and other states while more and more colleges began giving credit for AP Exam grades of 3 or better and more high schools began adopting the courses. Jack Arbolino continued Keller's good work as director of the AP Program from 1958 until 1965, when Harlan P. Hanson, another Williams College professor, took over the directorship. During Hanson's 25-year tenure, the program grew exponentially.
In the early 1960s, articles hailing the salutary effects of AP began to appear in academic and educational journals. April 1960 saw an article in the Bulletin of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), which included the following comment: "The Advanced Placement Program has stimulated an appraisal of the program of studies at all levels -- the elementary, secondary, and higher education. This examination and searching of the educational enterprise may well produce desirable improvements and a balance of opportunities for all of our young people" (Valentine 1987, 89). In a 1961 article in the same journal, the AP Program was cited as gaining significant momentum, in large part due to its increasing support by college faculty, the subsidization of its summer professional development institutes for teachers by states like New York, and its endorsement by important educational spokesmen, including James B. Conant, a former president of Harvard and author of The American High School Today, who called AP "one of the most encouraging signs of real improvement in our educational system." And in 1962, a report issued by the Midwest Administration Center of the University of Chicago concluded that "the C[ollege] E[ntrance] E[xamination] B[oard] has brought about curricular changes in the comprehensive high school by the successful introduction of the Advanced Placement courses... the impact of CEEB is great indeed" (90).
The College Board began a long-term commitment to teacher training by holding workshops for AP consultants and summer institutes for teachers during the 1960s. Secondary-school teachers began to feel that AP courses were revitalizing their careers. As AP teacher William Snyder said, "It has rejuvenated my entire teaching career. Anything you've been doing for a while gets stale. AP provides another path, a different avenue filled with adventure. For a teacher, it's like beginning again."
The Growth of AP
By 1960, AP Exam volume had grown to more than 10,000 examinations, five times the number offered the first year of the College Board's supervision of the program. By 1970, the number had jumped to nearly 72,000, and by 1980 to more than 160,000. In 1990, students at more than 9,000 participating schools took close to half a million exams, and in 2000 more than three-quarters of a million students took more than a million and a quarter AP Exams. In the most recent yearly administration, 2002, approximately 900,000 students took more than 1.5 million AP Examinations.
A number of interrelated factors fueled the success and spurred the growth of AP. One such factor was the commitment of the people involved -- at the College Board, in the secondary schools, and in the universities. Teachers and administrators, professors and instructors worked with and for the program in a multitude of capacities, including supervising and coordinating the AP Program at schools, serving on AP Exam Development Committees, working as AP Exam Readers of free-response questions, conducting AP workshops, conferences, and summer institutes -- and more. A second, related factor was the enthusiasm of the students who took AP courses and the support of their parents. Students and parents alike were aware of the academic value of AP for enhanced student learning and for opportunities and options once students reached college. Charles Keller, the first director of the AP Program, also noted how "benefits accrue not only to the students and teachers directly involved but to the whole student body and the entire staff" (Valentine 1987, 86).
As with other programs with challenging standards and high expectations, it was no surprise to find AP teachers among the most enthusiastic of all. Comments like the examples that follow were not unusual from teachers who participated in the early decades of AP and continue to come from teachers involved in the AP Program today. One teacher commented that the pleasure of teaching AP was such that "you would not have to pay me to do [it]." Another highlighted the professional growth a teacher experiences in remarking that "for the first time in 25 years I have had a chance to learn and relearn the newer concepts in chemistry." And a third described the exhilaration of the AP teaching experience by saying, "I take my life in my hands every time I go into that advanced class -- it's the most exciting teaching I have ever done" (Valentine 1987, 86). These few comments from teachers could be multiplied thousands of times over. In fact, comments like these were reprinted annually in the AP Yearbook throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.
AP in the 1980s
During the 1980s, as secondary school educators became more familiar with the AP Program, they began to open up AP courses to students in lower grades. A pattern began to emerge in which the ablest students would take an AP course and exam in sophomore year (AP Biology, for example), followed by a couple more exams as juniors and a few others in their senior year (Casserly 1986, 1). Another engine that spurred growth during the 1980s was the offering of AP courses through correspondence and mentoring programs for talented youth such as those at Duke University and the Johns Hopkins University.
However, it was not only the traditionally best-prepared students -- those from elite schools or those who could participate in special programs for the gifted -- who were taking AP courses and examinations. During the 1980s, AP spread to urban schools with traditionally underrepresented minority populations, students who were rarely among AP course and exam takers in the first decades of the AP Program. Perhaps the best-known example is the class of Jaime Escalante, a math teacher at Garfield High in Los Angeles, who was the focus of the popular film Stand and Deliver. Escalante's Latino students began taking the AP Calculus Examination in the late 1970s. In 1981, 18 students took the exam. By 1987, 155 AP Calculus Exams were taken by students of Mr. Escalante and fellow teacher Benjamin Jimenez (Rothschild 1995, 31).
It was not just a question of the increased numbers of Latino students participating in AP in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and other large U.S. cities that was gratifying to educators and to the College Board. Even more important was how AP teachers like Mr. Escalante and Mr. Jimenez were making a critical difference in the lives of their students. One of the reasons for the success of AP during its middle years was that more and more students had teachers who believed in them so strongly that they came, with equal conviction, to believe in themselves. It was the classic case of higher expectations leading to higher levels of performance -- though not without the long hours and extra work put in by teachers and students together to reach those exalted heights of achievement.
Sources of AP Growth
There were still other reasons for the success of the AP Program through the 1980s. Program growth was attributable to three related factors. First, an increasing number of schools participated in the program every year. Second, once a school entered the AP Program, it typically added AP courses and examinations until each school developed its own uniquely tailored portfolio of AP courses and examinations. Third, the number of students taking existing courses and their associated examinations increased annually.
Added to these ways in which the success of AP was being measured at the secondary school level were factors from the college and university side of the equation. The most important of these was that an increasing number of colleges and universities were willing to grant placement and/or credit on the basis of satisfactory performance on the AP Examinations, typically reflected in an AP grade of 3 or higher. This key dimension of the AP Program's success was linked with research studies done at campuses such as Indiana, Ohio State, Michigan, and Duke. Harlan Hanson, a long-time director of the AP Program, observed how such research studies "confirmed the hypotheses of the Program's founders: that college-level studies done well in school and matched with appropriate placement at college lead to stronger programs at both levels" (Hanson 1985, 11).
As more schools participated in the AP Program, and as more students took AP courses, additional teachers were needed to teach them. Since AP had become well established, well known, and well respected by its middle years, teachers were eager to sign on to "do AP." Many took advantage of the opportunity for professional development provided by the College Board through its weekend workshops, teacher conferences, and one- and two-week summer institutes. The enthusiasm of teachers, the demand for AP from students and their parents, and its acceptance by colleges and universities had a synergistic effect on the rise of AP during these years.
The number of schools participating in AP went from around 600 in 1960 to more than 3,000 in 1969, more than 4,500 in 1979, and more than 8,700 in 1989. The average number of examinations per school saw a similarly dramatic increase, rising from about 15 per school in 1960 to more than 50 per school in 1989. Nearly half of all AP Exams in 1989 were taken by women, and just under 22 percent were taken by those identifying themselves as ethnic minorities, though more than half of that number were Asian-Americans (AP Yearbook 1989, 2‑5).
The progress made by the AP Program during these three decades, though, is not entirely captured in these statistics, however dramatic they might appear. The heart and soul of the AP Program during these middle years of dynamic growth continued to be its people, especially the dedicated secondary school teachers and university professors who collaborated on every aspect of the program.
State and Federal Support for AP
During its first three-and-a-half decades, the AP Program had only modest support from a few state governments and no formal federal funding. This was to change dramatically in the 1990s. States such as Alabama, South Carolina, and Utah, which had begun supporting AP in a variety of ways, increased their support of the program. In 1990, Alabama, for example, provided AP minigrants to all public high schools. In South Carolina, where AP was mandated in every public high school, the state paid the full cost of the examinations for all students and also paid the costs for first-year teachers to attend AP Summer Institutes for professional development. In West Virginia, a significant sum was appropriated to create AP and honors-level courses. In Florida, the State Board of Education decided to pick up the costs for every AP Examination and award additional funds to schools for grades of 3 or better. Effective July 1, 1990, in Indiana, a special fund was established to encourage students to pursue advanced courses in math and science, including subsidizing the costs of AP Exams in those subjects (AP Yearbook 1990, 10-11).
By the mid-1990s, more than 20 states supported participation in the AP Program, with Georgia paying exam fees for all public school students, Texas paying for professional development for AP teachers and exam fees for disadvantaged students, Arkansas providing these services in addition to grants for materials and equipment, Colorado reimbursing AP fees to students upon being granted credit from Colorado colleges and universities. In 1996, the Massachusetts legislature budgeted $500,000 for developing AP courses in its schools and training AP teachers. Around the same time, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas allocated from $75,000 to $2 million for AP-related activities for teachers, students, and schools (AP Yearbook 1996, 16-17).
Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote in his "Where We Stand" column in the Sunday New York Times that every state should make AP more widely available. In doing so, Shanker argued, states would discover "that more of their students can meet tough AP standards than they thought possible" and that the states would also see that "greater participation in AP shifts the whole agenda of their schools towards higher academic achievement" (Shanker 1996). The state legislature of California in 1999 accepted this argument and followed in the wake of the other states by authorizing the largest single grant in the 20 years that states had been supporting AP -- a $16.5 million Challenge Grant Program to expand AP opportunities in 550 public high schools (AP Yearbook 2000, 19).
By the end of the decade, more than half the states had funds specifically allocated for AP Program support, with more to follow suit later. What was special about 1999, however, was that the federal government mandated $2.7 million as a grant to states either to supplement their support or to pay part or all of the cost of AP fees for low-income students. Federal grant money allocated to the states in support of AP would grow to $20 million in the next three years. This unprecedented level of state and federal support testified to the AP Program's reputation as the gold standard in American education, functioning at the level and serving the same purposes as other academically rigorous, outstanding national and international educational programs, such as the British A-Level exams, the French Baccalaureate, the German Abitur, and the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program.
The AP Commission Report
With the growth of AP in the 1990s outstripping even the dramatic growth of the previous decades, the Board of Trustees of the College Board established, in 1999, the Commission on the Future of the Advanced Placement Program. The Commission saw that with more than one million AP Examinations taken by nearly 800,000 students, with 100,000 teachers offering AP classes in 32 subjects, and with more than 56,000 teachers participating in professional development activities sponsored by the College Board, the size and scope of the program were causing it to confront significant challenges. The Commission was charged with recommending actions that would maintain the integrity and quality of the AP Program; expand the role of AP in improving American education; strengthen AP's cooperation between schools and colleges (Access to Excellence 2001, vi). The Commission, which focused on issues of quality, equity, and values, produced a carefully crafted document that has been used to guide strategic planning for the AP Program in the new millennium.
AP and Technology
The AP Program turned increasingly to technology to bolster its efforts to reach its constituents more efficiently and more effectively. An online ordering system for AP Exams was put into place for the 2000 AP Exam administration. Approximately 20 percent of the AP Exams that year and 70 percent the next were ordered online. By 2002, virtually all AP Examinations were ordered online. Users of the system found it convenient and efficient, giving AP Coordinators a way to track their orders and make adjustments with equal facility.
The largest investment of College Board technology resources for AP, however, was directed toward the development of a Web site, AP Central, which was launched in November 2001. Among its many resources are an electronic library of AP publications; AP Program data, research, and statistics; information about state and federal support for AP; course descriptions for all AP subjects and exams; resource catalogs for teachers in various AP subjects; reviews of current books, articles, and materials; and information about AP workshops and summer institutes. AP Central has quickly become the first place AP teachers and Coordinators turn to for up-to-date information about AP courses, exams, and professional development opportunities. In the first seven months of its existence, more than 90,000 educational professionals registered on the new AP Central Web site.
Quality Standards
Among the ways the AP Program works to maintain the integrity of its standards is to survey colleges and universities to ensure that AP courses and AP Exams retain their currency and accurately assess the skills and concepts of the equivalent college courses. Another strategy used is pretesting, in which multiple-choice AP Exam questions are administered in advance to college students who are taking the corresponding college course. In addition, college comparability studies are conducted periodically to check grading standards. In these studies, a portion of the AP Exam is administered to college students when they complete the course that corresponds to the AP course and examination. The performance of these students on the AP Exam is compared to their performance on their college tests and to their course grades. These college comparability studies allow the AP Program to set AP Exam grade boundaries so that the lowest AP Exam score earning an AP grade of 5 is roughly equivalent to the average score of college students who earn grades of A, the lowest score receiving an AP grade of 4 equals the average scores of those college students receiving a grade of B, and the lowest score corresponding to an AP grade of 3 equates to the average score of the college students receiving grades of C.
In addition to these measures to ensure the quality standards of AP, college and university professors serve on the Exam Development Committees, including serving as committee chairs. College and university faculty serve as the leadership for the AP Readings, in which answers to the free-response questions for all AP Exams are scored. College and university faculty serve on College Board advisory committees. And college and university faculty work closely with the College Board and ETS colleagues and with experienced secondary school AP teachers on professional development opportunities for teachers.
The commitment and dedication of all those who work with, for, and on the AP Program today, along with those who so worked in the past, have ensured its continued success. What one writer said about the AP Program at its fortieth anniversary applies as much today as ever: "AP is here to stay" (Rothschild 1995, 32). There is certainly no doubt about the staying power of AP. Nor is there any doubt about its influence in effecting change in educational practices. What remains for the future is for AP to consolidate its gains, preserve and augment its value, and increase the opportunities for a growing number of students, teachers, and schools worldwide to reap its benefits.
References
Access to Excellence: A Report of the Commission on the Future of the Advanced Placement Program. 2001. New York: The College Board.
AP Yearbooks 1989-2001. New York: The College Board.
Casserly, Patricia Lund. 1986. Advanced Placement Revisited. College Board Report No. 86-6. New York: College Entrance Examination Board.
Cornog, W. H. 1956. College Admission with Advanced Standing. Final Report and Summary of the June 1955 Evaluating Conferences of the School and College Study. The School and College Study of Admission with Advanced Standing.
General Education in School and College: A Committee Report by Members of the Faculties of Andover, Exeter, Lawrenceville, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. 1952. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Hanson, Harlan. 1985. "Reflections on Thirty Years of AP." College Board Review. New York: The College Board.
Rothschild, E. 1995. "Aspiration, Performance, Reward: The Advanced Placement Program at 40." College Board Review 176-177. New York: The College Board.
Shanker, Albert. 1996. "Where We Stand." Sunday New York Times (19 May).
Valentine, A. 1987. "An Echo from the Past: The Advanced Placement Program." The College Board and the School Curriculum. New York: College Entrance Examination Board.
Robert DiYanni is director of AP international services at the College Board. Before joining the Board in 1999, Dr. DiYanni taught English and humanities at a number of U.S. colleges and universities, including CUNY, Pace, NYU, and Harvard. He has published more than two dozen books on writing, literature, and humanities, mostly for university students. He is also a frequent lecturer and international workshop presenter.
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