Is a 5 on the AP test = A?

jbusc
Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:14:42 +0000

That is not the way to look at things. Even in college, because of curves, it is possible to get As with only a certain percentage of correct answers on the test.



I find this curious because I remember the AP teachers at my school saying this, that in college, the curve is usually such that tests end up being more in the 50%-70% range (for a good score), and I remember thinking that was somewhat odd. Well, now after 3 years of college, I believe that the lowest high score on an exam in a class I took was around 80%. More typically tests are designed such that it’s virtually expected the highest score in the class is in the 90’s (and this is in engineering too). Now, of course, that doesn’t mean the average score is anywhere near that high. But then, the average grade isn’t that high either: B-

Now, applying that to AP scores - it’s hard to say whether you can/should correlate them with grades. For my AP English, there were no grade changes allowed, regardless of AP score, but for my AP US History, either a 4 or 5 would bump you up to an A (the teacher gave this liberal grading policy because she felt some students performance in class didn’t reflect their true abilities). In the end it hardly mattered, as from what I heard, most of the students either got 5’s or 3’s (ouch, huge grade divide)