Add The New York Post on Google In 2021, just 17% of of high school students taking the Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition test earned top marks on the exam. Four years later, that number ballooned to more than 43%.
The major markup on grades for the AP English Lit test — one of the College Board’s most popular college credit exams — is part of a dramatic rise in passing rates since the COVID pandemic, prompting criticism that the tests are being watered down, and not actually preparing students for higher ed.
College professors have increasingly been sounding the alarm that shocking portions of students are arriving unable to do even middle school math or write a sentence.
Students earning a 5 on AP tests — the top score — rose 61% on average across nine central subjects from 2021 to 2025.
Those earning at least a 4 — which many colleges require to receive credit for the course — increased by 63%, figures from the College Board showed, according to an assessment of the numbers by Education Next.
Those increases come despite national standardized test scores dropping for years — with the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress results showing a record-low 35% of 12th graders were proficient at reading, while only 22% could handle basic math.
High school AP classes have historically been one students’ best opportunities to cut through competition and show top colleges they’re ready for their workload.
Making the grade on AP tests can also save incoming students thousands by allowing them to skip entry-level college courses.
But critics are beginning to question whether the AP tests are actually sufficiently preparing kids.
“All other national tests have been in slow decline for the last decade,” said Daniel Buck, a research fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
“So the fact that AP scores jumped almost overnight seems an implausible explanation.”
Education Next, an education journal affiliated with the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, noted in April that the nine subject areas which saw significant increases were each being graded under a new system — Evidence-Based Standard Setting (EBSS) — which the College Board rolled out around 2022.
College Board, which also run the SAT and PSAT college entrance exams, previously consulted a panel of about a dozen professors and teachers to determine what proportion of test takers should get top marks.
The new EBSS scoring system, however, broadened the pool of educators who determined the minimum requirements for each score.
The result was way more students making the grade the prestigious tests.
In addition to the English lit test’s huge jump, US Government and Politics saw similar increases of 4 and 5 scores — 23.6% in 2021, then 48.5% in 2025 — as did US History, which saw 26% of takers earn top marks in 2021 compared to 50.4% in 2025, according to Education Next.
College Board denied claims that it had inflated any scores, with the company’s senior vice president Trevor Packer penning a response in Education Next that said EBSS actually enabled a more accurate understanding of how individual students are performing and score accordingly.
“To claim AP is being ‘dumbed down’ dismisses the work of millions of students who take on this higher challenge each year,” Packer wrote, adding that new tech has “improved how exam data are collected and analyzed, allowing statisticians to draw on input from hundreds of college professors and better determine which skills individual students are demonstrating.”
College Board echoed Packer in a statement to The Post, saying the difficulty of its AP tests and scoring has not changed, but that EBSS provided “a more precise, data-rich method for verifying the score thresholds that determine what score students receive.”
“The exams themselves are unchanged. What improved is our ability to verify that the scores those exams produce accurately reflect college-level achievement,” said College Board media director Massie Ritsch.
But some experts are skeptical — and fearful for future generations’ education.
“Students meet the standard that you set them,” Buck said. “The test might be as rigorous as it was before, but if the grading is getting easier, if College Board was lowering their standards, then students are going to respond accordingly.”
“They’re going reduce the effort that they put in and will learn less because of it, because the standard has been lowered.”
