The number of students taking Advanced Placement exams has grown dramatically—participation has increased in 66 of the last 70 years since the AP exams were created—even as many families are unaware of the seismic shift taking place in academic standards and expectations. Especially at top colleges, AP exam scores are more important than student grades. Notably, Caltech and Stanford now require students to report AP exam scores on their applications for any AP class listed in their transcripts.
Many families still view AP exams as exams for advanced students only. But, by 2025, 37 percent of high school graduates had taken at least one AP exam. Across all public and private schools, more than three million students have taken the AP test—about a 166 percent an increase from 20 years ago, while the percentage of high school graduates overall has increased only slightly over that time.
The change isn’t just that more teenagers are taking AP exams. That ambitious students continue to take more of them. In 2004, for example, only 5,967 students had taken 10 or more AP exams in high school; in that group, only 162 students took more than 14. By 2024, 83,747 students had taken 10 or more AP exams; of this group, 6,234 students had taken more than 14. For a certain percentage of college-bound Americans, the question is no longer whether they will take AP exams. How many are enough.
Part of this is easy to explain. Almost all colleges award credit for certain courses based on AP exam scores, so doing well on AP exams can often save families money in college. More high schools offer AP exams than a generation ago, and the College Board now offers 42 AP courses, so there are plenty of classes to choose from. New options include AP Business with Personal Finance scheduled for 2026–27 and AP Cybersecurity, which is already in assessment form for 2025–26.
But a deeper reason why AP exams have become so unreliable: As grades lose their ability to reflect academic readiness, standardized measures are needed to replace them.
In a long-term national survey of college freshmen, only 21.8 percent of college students entering school in 1966 reported having an A average in high school; in 2019 they were changed to -68.1%. A rating had become, well, rating. But on the 2024 National Report Card, only 22 percent of 12th graders were proficient in math and 35 percent in reading—the latter the lowest rate ever recorded. Just last year, a report by the University of California, San Diego, found that school transcripts are “less reliable as a gauge” of student achievement.
Among students entering the fall of 2024 who demonstrated math skills below the middle school level, 94 percent had passed the high school math requirement, and more than 25 percent had 4.0 overall GPAs in their high school math classes. When documents say one thing and measure another, colleges begin to look more closely at standardized measures.
Admissions officers are becoming more and more open about this. In 2023, Emory University’s admissions manager said Emory “doesn’t trust” GPA and was giving more weight to external assessments, including AP scores. Even though top colleges do not require students to submit AP exam scores, many (Dartmouth, Georgetown, Yale, Princeton and others) recommend that applicants submit these scores for consideration.
Some colleges have begun publishing the number of AP exams their students took in high school. For example, the University of Georgia calculates that its average student in the last admissions cycle took 11 AP, International Baccalaureate or dual enrollment courses. In just two decades, taking AP courses has gone from exceptional to expected. Perhaps most importantly, while the University of California, Berkeley, is test-blind (it does not consider SAT or ACT scores in the admissions process), it still uses AP scores to evaluate applicants.
America has not set out to make AP exams more important. Rate inflation has done that. Although most students are below grade level in reading and math, Gallup and Learning Heroes found that nine out of 10 parents believe their child is at or above grade level in these subjects.
If the transcript no longer reliably describes what the student knows, parents and colleges need to look elsewhere for sources that do. That’s the real story of the rise of AP: not that students suddenly needed more tests, but that they needed at least some measures that still told the truth. Unless the grade inflation epidemic reverses course, the continued rise of AP exams seems inevitable—and perhaps necessary.
