Advanced Placement examinations are taken each May by students at participating American, Canadian, and international educational institutions. The tests are the culmination of year-long Advanced Placement (AP) courses. All but one of the AP exams combine multiple-choice questions with a free-response section in either essay or problem-solving format. AP Studio Art

AP Studio Art

AP Studio Art is a series of Advanced Placement Courses divided into three different categories: AP Studio Art Drawing, AP Studio Art 2D, and AP Studio Art 3D.-The portfolio:...

, the sole exception, requires students to submit a portfolio

Career portfolio

Career portfolios are used to plan, organize and document education, work samples and skills. People use career portfolios to apply to jobs, apply to college or training programs, get a higher salary, show transferable skills, and to track personal development. They are more in-depth than a resume,...

 for review.

AP

The exams themselves are not tests of the students' mastery of the course material in a traditional sense. Rather, the students themselves set the grading rubrics and the scale for the "AP Grades" of each exam. When the AP Reading is over for a particular exam, the free response scores are combined with the results of computer-scored multiple-choice questions based upon a previously announced weighting. The Chief Reader (a college or university faculty member selected by the Educational Testing Service

Educational Testing Service

Educational Testing Service , founded in 1947, is the world's largest private nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization...

 and The College Board) then meets with members of ETS and sets the cutoff scores for each AP Grade. The Chief Reader's decision is based upon what percentage of students earned each AP Grade over the previous three years, how students did on multiple-choice questions that are used on the test from year to year, how he or she viewed the overall quality of the answers to the free response questions, how university students who took the exam as PART A experimental studies did, and how students performed on different parts of the exam. No one outside of this is ETS is allowed to find out a student's raw score on an AP Exam and the cutoff scores for a particular exam are only released to the public if that particular exam is released in total (this happens on a staggered schedule and occurs approximately once every five years for each exam). The AP Grades that are reported to students, high schools, colleges, and universities in July are on AP's five-point scale:

• 5: Extremely well qualified
• 4: Well-qualified
• 3: Qualified
• 2: Possibly qualified
• 1: No recommendation

In the United States

Many colleges and universities in the U.S. grant credits or advanced placement based on AP test scores; those in over twenty other countries do likewise. Policies vary by institution, but most schools require a score of 3 or higher on any given exam for credit to be granted or course prerequisites to be waived (and some will award an "A" grade for a 5 score). Colleges may also take AP grades into account when deciding which students to accept, though this is not part of the official AP program.

In the United Kingdom

Like in the United States, the policy tends to vary by institution.

Grading of exams

The AP exams are graded each summer at a week-long "grading camp." Both high school AP teachers and university professors are invited to grade the exams at a predetermined location.