Student Performance on Advanced Placement Exams in the Humanities
- In 2019, AP exams in the humanities were less likely to receive a 4 or 5 than exams in the other academic fields (Indicator I-12h).1 Approximately 28% of exams in the humanities were scored that high, while more than 40% of tests taken in math/computer science and 48% of exams in the arts earned those scores. (The focus here is on 2019, because the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic may have made exams taken in 2020 unrepresentative.)
- The share of humanities exams receiving scores of 4 or 5 was quite constant from 2005 to 2019, as was true of exams in the behavioral/social sciences and math/computer science. In both the humanities and behavioral/social sciences, 2020 and the pandemic brought a modest increase in the share of 4s and 5s. This was in contrast to the arts, which saw a steady upward trend in the share of highly scored exams through 2019 and then a plateau in 2020. In the natural sciences the trend was again different: a decline in the share of high-score exams from 2005 to 2015 and then recovery.
- Among the humanities exams, students earned the largest share of 4s or 5s on the Spanish language test, and by a substantial margin (Indicator I-12i). Forty-six percent of students scored that high, while the humanities subject with the next largest share of high-scorers, art history, had 37% of students receiving a 4 or 5.
- Among humanities subjects, students were least likely to achieve a score of 4 or 5 on the English literature exam (with 22% achieving those scores). The Italian exam produced a similarly low share of 4s and 5s.
- When examining how racial/ethnic groups compare with respect to the share of highly scored exams, publicly available information does not permit the exclusion of tests in languages other than English taken by students with considerable exposure to the language outside the classroom. When all humanities exams are considered, exams taken by American Indian/Alaska Native and Black students were substantially less likely to receive a score of 4 or 5 than those taken by members of other racial/ethnic groups (Indicator I-12j).
- The humanities were similar to the sciences and arts in that exams taken by Asian students were considerably more likely than exams taken by students of other backgrounds to receive a 4 or 5. Unique to the humanities was the substantial differential between Black and Hispanic students with respect to the share of exams given high scores. Exams taken by Hispanic students were more than twice as likely as those taken by Black students to receive a high score.
- The humanities and the arts had a much smaller high-score differential between Hispanic and White students than the sciences. In the humanities, the share of highly scored exams taken by White students was roughly a third larger than that of Hispanic students, while on science exams White students’ share of highly scored exams was more than twice as large as the share for Hispanic students. When Spanish exams are excluded, however, the share of highly scored humanities exams taken by Hispanic students drops from 26% to 15%, which increases substantially the differential between these students and their White counterparts (with a high-score rate of 33%).
- For information regarding student performance by race/ethnicity in specific humanities subjects, see Supplemental Table I-12j.
Endnotes
- 1In speaking about academic fields (humanities, arts, etc.), the appropriate units are exams taken (rather than students), because each student may have taken more than one exam in a field in a given year.
* For exams in languages other than English (excluding Spanish literature), only the scores of students who received most of their exposure to the language in U.S. schools were included. These are students who did not indicate on their answer sheet that they regularly speak or hear the language of the exam or that they lived for one month or more in a country where the language is widely spoken.
Source: College Board, AP Program Participation and Performance Data 2020, “National Summary Report” and “Student Score Distribution,” (accessed fall 2021). Data analyzed and presented by the American Ƶ of Arts and Sciences' Humanities Indicators ().
I-12i: Share of Advanced Placement Exams Receiving a Score of 4 or 5, by Academic Field/Subject, 2019
* For exams in languages other than English (with the exception of Spanish literature and culture), only the scores of students who received most of their exposure to the language in U.S. schools were included. These are students who did not indicate on their answer sheet that they regularly speak or hear the language of the exam, or that they lived for one month or more in a country where the language is widely spoken.
Source: College Board, AP Program Participation and Performance Data 2019, “National Summary Report” and “Student Score Distribution,” (accessed fall 2021). Data analyzed and presented by the American Ƶ of Arts and Sciences' Humanities Indicators ().
Source: College Board, AP Program Participation and Performance Data 2019, “National Summary Report,” (accessed fall 2021). Data analyzed and presented by the American Ƶ of Arts and Sciences' Humanities Indicators ().
College Board gives students the option of identifying as “American Indian/Alaska Native,” “Asian,” “Black,” “Hispanic/Latino,” “Native Hawaiian,” “White,” or “Two or More Races,” or “Other”—or not responding at all. The Humanities Indicators has combined the “Asian” and “Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander” to align with the HI indicator relating to the racial/ethnic composition of those taking AP exams and how it compares to the composition of the secondary student population generally (the National Center for Education Statistics employs the broader category of “Asian & Pacific Islander” in describing the racial/ethnicity of the country’s high schoolers).
The “Other” category was omitted from this analysis because only one student identified as such.
