2025 AP Exams: Scoring, Standards, and Security in a New Digital Era

Scores on 6.25 million AP® Exams are set to be released to colleges, students, and high schools worldwide in the coming days, wrapping up a pivotal season for the AP Program.

Here are the headlines:

• AP Exams are now digital
• Digital exams have eliminated theft and disclosure of paper question booklets, AP’s top security risk
• Processes for determining AP scores have greatly improved
• AP maintains high standards of rigor, consistently exceeding college-level expectations 

The 2025 AP 3+ score distributions

NOTE: AP Latin is italicized as it is scheduled for standard setting in June 2026, necessitated by the changes to the course and exam for the upcoming school year.  
 

How are AP Exams scored? 

AP Exams typically have two main components: a multiple-choice section and a free-response section. While the multiple-choice portion is scored digitally, the free-response answers are evaluated by more than 31,000 high school and college educators during the annual AP Reading, a large-scale event held both in-person in four cities and virtually over several weeks in June. The AP Readings of 2025 were the largest in the history of these annual events. 

After calibrating on the scoring guidelines, these educator “readers” assess more than 20 million student responses (essays, problems, artworks) using detailed rubrics. Scores from both sections are combined into a composite score (e.g., 109 points out of 120 possible), which is then converted into the familiar AP 1–5 scale. 
 

How do AP Exam scores compare to college grades? 

The AP Program exists to provide college-level coursework in high school. And AP courses and exams have been the gold standard for academic rigor in U.S. high schools for decades. Students earning an exam score of 3 or higher can be confident they’ve achieved a level of mastery that doesn’t just meet but exceeds an equivalent grade in a college-level course. 

How do we know AP is more rigorous, on average, than the equivalent work in college? We conduct research that: 

1. Identifies the knowledge and skills students must demonstrate to receive college credit, and rather than grading AP students on a curve (we don’t), we require AP students to meet that academic standard to receive a score of 3 or higher.
    
2. Follows AP students into subsequent college coursework, validating the AP score’s accuracy in placing them into a course where they perform as well as or better than other college students.
    
3. Collects AP Exam difficulty data from hundreds of college professors, confirming that AP Exams meet, and often exceed, the rigor of comparable college courses. 

Typically, AP Program’s high standards result in 60%–75% of AP Exams earning a score of 3 or higher, which is equivalent to a college C or better. By contrast, colleges in our standard setting studies award grades of C or higher to approximately 75%–90% of their students in similar courses. 

Even as college grades have drifted upward over time, AP has maintained high standards for performance. In fact, the AP standard of achievement in 2025 is more rigorous than the standard of achievement in colleges in 1990 —35 years ago! (average college GPA in 1990: 2.8. GPA equivalent of the average AP score in 2025: 2.5)¹ 

_{1 Source: National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, National Center for Education Statistics. AP Exam scores are translated to a GPA scale (e.g., AP score of 5=4.0, AP score of 4=3.3, etc.) to support a comparison of average college grades and AP Exam scores.} 
 

What makes a score of 5 on an AP Exam a 5? And a 3 a 3, etc.? 

Over the past few years, the AP Program has been transitioning to an evidence-based method for setting score standards (it’s called Evidence-Based Standard Setting or EBSS). This approach replaces the small faculty panels (made up of about 15 college professors) in years past that would estimate AP students’ knowledge and skills—which was a psychometrically valid method, but one that involved some degree of inconsistency. 

Now, instead of estimating, the evidence-based method uses large-scale data collection and analysis to identify specific levels of performance where students are demonstrating the knowledge and skills that should be expected for awarding credit. 

Here’s a breakdown of the evidence-based approach using this year’s AP English Language and Composition Exam as an example: 

• 773 professors at 524 colleges evaluated the difficulty level of the AP Exam in relation to their own final exams. They found that while they are currently awarding 37% of their own college students an A, the difficulty of the AP Exam was so much higher that only 11% of their students would receive an A if taking it.
   
• Further analysis showed AP students received nearly triple the instructional hours and had stronger academic profiles (SAT^®/PSAT^® scores) than their college counterparts, and they also outperformed them in subsequent college English courses.
   
• Experts then identified the knowledge and skills students were able to demonstrate on each question at each point of the 100-point score scale for the exam.
   
  • To earn a 5, students had to earn high points for evidence and reasoning across all three of their timed essays. This year, 13% met that standard.
     
  • To earn a 3, students had to consistently generate a thesis statement and support it with evidence on all three of their timed essays. But these students did not achieve the same level of polish in the structure and reasoning of their argument as students meeting the standard for a 5. This year, 74% met this high standard for a 3.

For more about Evidence-Based Standard Setting, see below.
 

Are more students taking AP? What do they think of their courses? 

Overall, student participation in AP courses and exams grew by 7% from 2024 to 2025, increasing in 36 AP courses and declining in 4:

The five AP courses with the largest growth this year were: 

1. AP Precalculus
2. U.S. Government and Politics
3. AP Seminar
4. AP World History
5. AP Biology

Student participation declined in these four AP courses: 

1. AP Art History
2. AP Computer Science A (Java)
3. AP Computer Science Principles
4. AP Music Theory 

At the end of the school year, AP students worldwide report their course satisfaction on a 1–10 scale. This year, the five AP courses students found most satisfying are: 

1. AP Calculus BC (average rating of 8.00)
2. AP United States Government and Politics (7.91)
3. AP Calculus AB (7.77)
4. AP European History (7.76)
5. AP United States History (7.68) 

On the other end of the scale, the AP courses students found least satisfying were: 

1. AP Italian Language and Culture (average rating of 3.68)
2. AP Japanese Language and Culture (4.07)
3. AP German Language and Culture (5.68)
4. AP French Language and Culture (5.92)
5. AP Latin (5.98) 
    

This year’s big change: DIGITAL 

The 2025 AP Exam administration was the first in which students took AP end-of-course exams in most subjects solely on Bluebook^TM, the College Board’s digital testing platform. Across the 40 AP subjects, student satisfaction with the exam increased in 29 subjects, and decreased in 11 subjects. Overall, more than 90% of students surveyed found Bluebook easy to use for this exam administration. 

Digital vs. paper: Some have asked whether digital exams give students an advantage or disadvantage compared to paper formats. The answer is neither format provides an advantage. Thanks to common item equating (reusing) of certain test questions, experts account for difficulty differences between test versions. If, for instance, digital test takers scored higher or lower on common questions than paper test takers did in prior years, score conversions are adjusted to ensure consistency of standards across years and exam formats.

A big win for test security: The transition to digital testing was designed to prevent theft and disclosure of paper exam questions—a growing problem in recent years. This year, not a single digital exam was compromised before exam day. Digital exams are only accessible within a secure, proctored testing environment. And students cannot access their test materials until they log in on test day, eliminating the risk of early exposure.

A lingering issue: While cell phones remain prohibited in exam rooms, a number of proctors this year detected students attempting to use cell phones to look up answers to test questions or to photograph exam questions. These students’ scores were canceled. 

Appendix: More about evidence-based standard setting (EBSS) 

EBSS findings for this year

Nine subjects had an evidence-based standard setting this year. At the links below are the specific findings for each of these subjects.

• AP English Language and Composition 
• AP English Literature and Composition 
• AP Psychology 
• AP Environmental Science 
• AP Physics 1 
• AP Physics 2 
• AP Physics C: Mechanics
• AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism 
• AP Human Geography 
   

Why change the standard-setting process?

Before large data sets and analytic tools were available, educator panels were the state of the art for standard setting. But over the years, the panel approach sometimes moved scores in ways that generated some confusion.

For example, in 2013 the “pass rate”—scores of 3 and above—for AP Spanish Language was 56%. In 2014, a panel raised it to 89%. In 2014, the “pass rate” for AP Physics was 60% and in 2015, a panel decreased the pass rate to 37%.

There were inconsistencies even within the same academic department: one panel set a “pass rate” of 48% for AP U.S. History, typically taken in 11th grade, and a different panel set a “pass rate” of 65% for AP World History: Modern.

The new evidence-based approach establishes an enduring standard that is not subject to such fluctuations and creates a more stable, accurate, and clear standard for educators, their students, and the colleges that enroll them.

To learn even more about how EBSS works, read here.