Quad

DataPull request #133

We checked our AP course counts against College Board's official list

We checked our count of AP courses at each high school against College Board's official AP Course Ledger for 41 pilot schools; the two agreed within two courses at 59% of them, short of our 80% bar, so the count stays as it is while we decide how to present it.

What's new

  • Nothing changes on the site yet. The reading that places your courses against what your high school offers keeps its current count of AP courses.
  • Behind that number. Each high school's AP course count comes from the federal Civil Rights Data Collection (2023–24), where schools report how many different AP courses they teach. Before telling every student "you've taken 6 of your school's 14 AP courses", we wanted a second source to agree with it.

Behind the scenes

  • The second source is College Board's AP Course Ledger, the official list of the courses each school is authorized to call AP, public and private. We looked up the 42 pilot high schools that have a federal count (Dallas–Fort Worth, Los Angeles, and New York); 41 matched a Ledger entry.
  • The two sources agreed within two courses at 24 of the 41 schools (59%), or 27 (66%) using the Ledger's 2023–24 year, the same year as the federal count. The Ledger usually runs one course higher. Our bar was 80%, so the check fails. The gaps run both ways: the federal count is what a school says it teaches, and the Ledger is what it renewed with College Board that year, which can drop sharply in a year a renewal is missed.
  • What follows is a decision, recorded in the plan: show the count as approximate, or switch the course picker to the Ledger's named list of courses, which also covers private schools (21 of the 33 private pilot schools are listed).