<p>So the guessing penalty on AP exams has been eliminated. My question is: How does this affect the difficulty of the exam? (if at all?) </p>
<p>Will they give us harder questions because they’ve also now given us free license to guess?</p>
<p>I doubt it; they’ll more likely raise the cutoffs for obtaining 3’s, 4’s, 5’s. Then again, the scoring depends on how well the students do.</p>
<p>The cutoff scores for each level were raised when the guessing penalty was removed; the exam difficulty wasn’t changed.</p>
<p>The scales (raw score to 1-5 score) do not depend on how people do on the exam. They are constructed so that a 5 corresponds to an A, 4 to a B, etc., in the related college course.</p>
<p>The difficulty really was not increased with the guessing penalty. However some courses e.g. Euro have amped up the difficulty in the past 2-4 years.</p>