Anne Kim: The AP Exam and the Standardized Testing Debate

“I think the downside of going test-optional, the downside of ignoring what assessments tell you, means that you might end up ignoring the underlying structural problems and never fixing the inequities.”

On October 12th, Anne Kim joined Merion West editor-in-chief Erich Prince to discuss her recent Washington Monthly piece “AP’s Equity Face-Plant,” which chronicles some of the shortcomings of advanced placement exams and how they have arguably failed to meet their goals over the past nearly 70 years. A lawyer by trade, Ms. Kim is a contributing editor at Washington Monthly, and, in February of last year, she published a book entitled Abandoned: America’s Lost Youth and the Crisis of Disconnection. In their conversation, Ms. Kim and Mr. Prince discuss the original purpose behind the exams, where they have potentially fallen short, and how this issue intersects with broader questions about the place of higher education in the United States today. (This interview can be read alongside Mr. Prince’s July, 2021 interview with the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz “The Devaluation of Higher Education.”)

Anne, to get started, can you talk about the original purpose of the AP exam, which, as you point out in your piece, was multipronged and aimed to provide more curriculum rigor while also looking to level the playing field with racial minorities and people from lower-income backgrounds?

Sure—the AP program began in the 1950s. It was really intended to be a way to accelerate high-performing, ambitious, and precocious high schoolers to get them ready for college, and you have studies finding that the kids who took AP were doing really well in college. They weren’t, of course, looking at whether AP caused these kids to do well in college versus there being just the correlation between who took AP and who succeeded in college. Nevertheless, education reformers seized upon the Advanced Placement program as a way to raise the bar for everyone, and I think that was actually well-intended. If you can get AP in every classroom, perhaps that could increase achievement across the board, and certainly it was the case that—from an equity perspective—it was important to have access to an accelerated curriculum for everybody. You want to raise the bar for everyone; you want to give everyone a chance to excel, and that was what the expansion of AP was intended to do.