AP Statistics:
Students’ Choices
After High School
Brian F. Patterson, Assistant Research Scientist at the College Board
T
he College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program was
founded in 1955 as a national testing program with the goal of
providing high-school students opportunities to take college-
level courses. As of the 2009 administration, the AP program will consist
of 37 courses in 20 subject areas. Despite the tremendous growth of the
program, the College Board has not been able to systematically track
what happens to the exam-taking population after it is examined, nor
has it any information about students who take an AP course, but not
the corresponding AP exam.
There is the expectation that students participating in the AP pro-
gram tend to be more likely than nonparticipants to choose postsec-
ondary course work related to the discipline in which they are exam-
ined, and there is some evidence supporting this claim. A series of
studies evaluated the extent to which AP examinees continued studies
in the AP exam discipline at the postsecondary level. Both Warren
Willingham and Margaret Morris, who followed 1,115 students at
nine postsecondary institutions, and R. Morgan and C. Crone, who
analyzed data from first-year students in the University of California
system, found that students taking AP exams in a given discipline are
more likely to have enrolled in postsecondary courses in that subject
area than students not taking the exams.
6 AMSTAT NEWS MAY 2009
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