Beyond the AP Score: How We Think About Curriculum

Before anything else, congratulations are in order.

This spring, three Holderness students accomplished something extraordinary. Rising seniors Margaret Owens and Tina Zhao each earned the highest possible score: a 5 on six different Advanced Placement exams over a two-week period. Caleb Perlman earned five scores of 5 and one score of 4 across six exams in the same time span.

Their accomplishments would stand out as exceptional at any school in the country. They deserve to be celebrated, and I hope our community pauses long enough to do exactly that.

FAST FACTS

• 82 AP Scholars
• 150 Students Taking AP Exams
• 83% Overall Pass Rate (Score of 3 or Higher)

Key Takeaways

A celebration of achievement. Three Holderness students earned exceptional AP results, while nearly 150 students completed almost 400 AP exams, with performance well above national averages.

Curriculum decisions should be intentional. At Holderness, every course—whether AP, honors, or school-designed—is evaluated based on one question: What best serves our students?

Independent schools should be different. The strength of an independent school lies in its ability to design a curriculum that aligns with its mission, faculty expertise, and students' needs—not simply follow national trends.

Families should ask deeper questions. Rather than asking only how many AP courses a school offers, families should explore how and why academic decisions are made.

College admissions value rigor over test scores. Colleges place greater emphasis on a student's transcript and the rigor of their coursework than on AP exam scores, which are primarily used for college placement and credit.

Celebrating Exceptional Achievement

They weren't alone. Nearly 150 Holderness students completed one or more AP exams this spring, representing nearly half of our student body. Together they completed nearly 400 exams. Eighty-two students earned AP Scholar recognition, including 32 AP Scholars with Distinction and one AP International Diploma recipient. Across nearly every AP course we offer, Holderness students performed well above national averages, often by double-digit margins.

This began as a short note of congratulations. Then I realized it couldn't simply be that.

AP Is One Part of a Bigger Academic Conversation

Over the last decade, AP courses have become one of the most discussed topics in independent schools. Some schools have moved away from them entirely. Others have expanded them. Some have landed somewhere in between. Holderness has been part of that same conversation, and these students' accomplishments reminded me that while we celebrate the results, we rarely explain how we think about the program behind them.

Those results brought me back to the fact that AP is only one example of a much larger set of academic decisions schools make every year.

One of the great strengths of an independent school is the freedom to build its own curriculum. That freedom is exciting, but it also comes with increased responsibility. Schools have to decide not only what to teach, but why — reexamining those choices every year. Every few years, education offers another trend, another framework, another acronym promising to reshape teaching and learning. Some become lasting improvements. Others quietly fade away. Good schools should pay attention to those conversations. They just shouldn’t mistake educational fashion for educational philosophy.

The same kind of thinking applies to much more than AP. It's needed when looking at project-based learning, competency-based assessment, AI in education, interdisciplinary courses, skills versus content, and countless other conversations schools are having every year. The question isn't whether those ideas are good or bad. The question is whether they make sense for your students. For us, that's always been the starting point.

What best serves Holderness students? Not just while they're here, but long after they graduate? That question doesn't always lead to the same answer.

Sometimes it leads us to fully embrace an AP course. Every AP course we currently offer is there because the teachers responsible for it believe it represents the kind of rigorous, college-level work they want students doing. We don't offer AP simply because the College Board offers it. We offer it because our faculty believes in the curriculum.

Sometimes we take that curriculum and reshape it. About seven years ago, Kelsey Berry and Andrew Sheppe redesigned our advanced history program into what became Advanced History of the West. Instead of treating AP United States History and AP European History as separate courses, they built a two-year sequence integrating both into a single study of the modern Atlantic world. Students complete both AP exams at the end of the second year, usually as juniors, after another full year of growth as readers, writers, and thinkers. We believe those histories make more sense together than apart.

Over the years, I've described the course to College Board leaders, AP readers, and members of the AP test development committees. Every time, I've heard the same response: they aren't aware of another school in the country offering this combined course and sequence.

Our mathematics department arrived at a somewhat similar conclusion. Rather than adopting AP Precalculus, Elizabeth Wolf and her department designed Advanced Precalculus, combining our honors precalculus curriculum with the opening work of AP Calculus AB before students move into AP Calculus BC. The result is a two-year pathway that reflects what our department believes best prepares students for advanced mathematics.

Other times, the answer is to build something entirely our own.

Under Sarah Barton's leadership, our Capstone Program has become one of the defining academic experiences at Holderness. The College Board offers AP Seminar and AP Research. We chose a different path because our faculty believed we had already built the kind of sustained inquiry and independent scholarship we wanted for our students.

And sometimes the answer is simply to say no.

Independent by Design

Randy Houseman, science department chair, and our science department have chosen not to offer AP Chemistry because they believe both the sequence and the curriculum are less well suited to Holderness students than the chemistry program they've built. For us, chemistry best lands in the sophomore year. We believe that sequence is less well suited to an AP course. Furthermore, advanced courses (listed at the same level in our curriculum guide as AP courses) such as Biomechanics, Enlightenment and Romanticism, Linear Algebra, and Differential Equations exist for much the same reason. We want students to have those courses whether the College Board happened to recognize them or not. And we want to offer them at the level that best suits our students and our curriculum.

None of those decisions were made quickly. They came from years of conversations among teachers, department chairs, the Academic Committee, administrators, and colleagues at other independent schools. They came from disagreement, revision, experimentation, and, occasionally, changing our minds. I don't expect every thoughtful independent school to reach the same conclusions we have. In fact, I hope they don't.

Independent schools should look different from one another. They serve different students. They hire different teachers. They develop different strengths. The important question isn't whether a school offers AP courses, abandons them, or builds something in between. The important question is whether the people responsible for the curriculum have thought deeply enough to know why. I sometimes wonder whether families ask enough of those questions.

When families visit schools, academics are often treated as the hurdle that must be cleared before attention turns to everything else. Is it rigorous enough? Good. Now let’s talk about athletics, advising, residential life, or college counseling. I understand why. Those things matter. But they are not why schools exist.

Schools exist to cultivate thoughtful, curious, knowledgeable young people. If I were choosing a school today, one of my first questions would be how the faculty and academic leaders make decisions about curriculum. A school’s answer to that question tells you far more than whether it offers AP courses.

AP courses are part of that conversation, not the whole conversation. They are one window into how a school thinks about learning. If I were choosing a school for my child today, I’d want to know whether I trusted the people making those decisions.

• How do they decide to create a course?
• Why replace another one?
• When do they adopt a national curriculum, and when do they trust their own faculty to build something better?
• What assumptions have they revisited over the last decade?

Those are the questions that tell me whether a school has earned my trust.

Rigor Matters More Than a Test Score

I asked our Director of College Counseling, Tim Cushing, a simple question: What do you wish families better understood about AP courses and AP exam scores? His response captures an important distinction that often gets lost in conversations about AP.

According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the two most important academic factors in the college admission process are a student’s grades and the rigor of their curriculum. Taking Advanced Placement (AP) courses—while also completing a strong four-year program across the core academic subject areas and enrolling in honors courses when offered—is one of the strongest ways students can demonstrate academic rigor during high school.

AP exam scores serve a different purpose. While some colleges may consider AP scores as one additional piece of information, they are rarely a significant factor in admission decisions. This is especially true because AP exam scores from senior year are not available until after most admission and enrollment decisions have been made.

Instead, AP exam scores are primarily used after a student enrolls in college. Depending on a college’s individual policies, strong AP scores may earn college credit, allow placement into higher-level courses, or satisfy certain graduation requirements. These can provide meaningful academic and financial benefits for students.

While these benefits are significant, families should remember that consistent success in rigorous coursework remains the strongest indicator of college readiness and is generally far more influential in the college admission process than any single AP exam score.

Celebrate the Achievement. Examine the Work.

Tim’s perspective reinforces something I appreciate about our own conversations at Holderness. Every July, when AP scores are released, we celebrate the many successes of our students and faculty. Then we do what schools should do. We learn what the scores have to share.

We compare them with previous years. We compare them with national results. We ask where our curriculum worked well and where it should improve. Those scores matter. They help us evaluate our work. They simply aren't the work itself.

That work belongs to teachers who refine courses year after year. It belongs to department chairs willing to rethink long-standing programs. It belongs to advisors, coaches, college counselors, and to people like Lydia Darling—our Registrar, Director of Special Services, and AP Coordinator—whose work ranges from coordinating hundreds of AP exams to helping students receive the testing accommodations they need. Most of that work happens quietly, months before tests are taken and scores are released. The spotlight belongs on the students today, but it’s made possible by the care and preparation of people like Lydia and so many others across the school.

Which brings me back to where I started.

Congratulations again to Margaret, Tina, Caleb, and to every Holderness student who challenged themselves through advanced coursework this year. Your accomplishments deserve to be celebrated on their own. If they also encourage families to ask deeper questions about how schools think, how colleges evaluate rigor, and how schools make academic decisions, then they’ve given all of us something worth celebrating as well.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why doesn't Holderness offer every AP course?

Some departments have determined that their own curriculum better serves students than the AP framework. For example, Holderness has chosen not to offer AP Chemistry because faculty believe their existing chemistry sequence provides a stronger educational experience.

Are AP exam scores important for college admissions?

AP coursework and a rigorous academic schedule are far more important than AP exam scores. According to college admissions professionals, grades earned in challenging courses carry significantly more weight during the admissions process than exam results.

What are AP exam scores primarily used for?

Strong AP scores may earn college credit, satisfy graduation requirements, or allow students to enroll in higher-level college courses, depending on each institution's policies.

How does Holderness create its own advanced courses?

Faculty regularly evaluate curriculum through collaboration, research, and ongoing assessment. When a school-designed course better supports student learning than an existing AP course, Holderness develops its own advanced curriculum, such as the Advanced History of the West sequence.

What should families ask when evaluating a school's academics?

Instead of focusing only on the number of AP courses offered, families should ask:

• How are curriculum decisions made?
• Why does the school offer certain advanced courses?
• How often is the curriculum reviewed and updated?
• How does the academic program prepare students for college and lifelong learning?

What do strong AP results reveal about a school?

While impressive scores reflect student achievement, they also demonstrate the quality of teaching, thoughtful curriculum design, and a school's commitment to continuous academic improvement. At Holderness, AP results are viewed as one valuable measure—not the ultimate goal—of an exceptional education.

About the Author

Jordan Graham
Dean of Academics

Jordan Graham serves as Dean of Academics and is a residential faculty member.

Prior to Holderness, Jordan completed both his Bachelor’s degree in history and political science and his Master's degree in history, specializing in modern American history, at the University of Montana.