AP Score Analysis

“Please come to my office at 1:30. I’d like to discuss your AP scores.” 

That’s a meeting you probably don’t look forward to, but it’s a meeting you will likely have at some point during your career if you teach an AP science course. Don’t sweat it. Just prepare for the discussion. Those scores aren’t yours. Good or bad, they belong to your former students.   

Standardized test scores, such as AP (Advanced Placement) test scores, don’t account for many factors that are beyond a teacher’s control. Acknowledging this, we should use the data we receive from them. How should we utilize the data obtained from our AP Score Reports? We should use the data to inform and improve, not judge instruction.

"Standardized tests have a place. But they should not be the dominant culture of education. They should be diagnostic. They should help." -Sir Ken Robinson

Using AP test scores to improve instruction can be incredibly powerful if you look beyond just the final score and dig into the specific patterns and areas of student performance. 

The College Board provides detailed score reports (for teachers) that break down performance by topic and skill. This is a valuable diagnostic tool that informs future instructional practices. 

Ask yourself: Did students do worse on content covered earlier or later in the year? Which topics did students demonstrate greater content mastery in? What strategies or materials helped boost student performance?

AP Score Reports do not provide enough data to form valid conclusions about teacher effectiveness. To do that, we need much more data about each student. Proper score analysis requires, at a bare minimum, the following for each student: 

• PSAT/PreACT scores

• SAT/ACT scores

• Previous AP scores 

• Current year AP test scores 

• The national average for each test during the year it was taken 

• Attendance record 

• Extenuating circumstances  

If a school administrator requests to meet with you to discuss your students' performance on the AP exam, professionally request that they organize and share all of the relevant data for each student in advance of the meeting. You need all of the relevant data to formulate valid conclusions. Anything less is a lazy analysis. 

Misusing AP Score Report data can harm instructional practice. When test scores are improperly used to evaluate teacher effectiveness, it creates pressure to teach to the test and utilize instructional strategies that primarily activate lower levels of thinking.

A common mistake many school administrators make is using AP Score Reports in near isolation to evaluate teacher effectiveness. High AP scores don’t mean effective teaching, and low scores don’t mean ineffective teaching. A comprehensive teacher evaluation system should be based upon qualitative measures: multi-day classroom observations, portfolios (that include lesson plans, assessments, assessment feedback to students, student surveys, and self-reflection), and professional development engagement. AP scores should be a very minor component of teacher evaluation.

During your meeting, you might hear a comment along the lines of“I’d like to see your students earn AP scores like the Chinese Language and Culture or the Physics C teacher.” Come to the meeting prepared with the national average scores for each AP subject area at the ready. It might be necessary to teach your supervisor about validity. 

Comparing teachers with very different student populations using the same metric (AP scores) is highly misleading. For example, it is obviously spurious to compare AP score data from schools with very different socioeconomic demographics. It is also invalid to compare student scores for students in different subject areas. Yet, test scores do provide some information about student learning, and this data should not be disregarded. We should use the limited data we have to inform and improve instruction.