There is nothing abnormal about deviance. This is a lesson I learned growing up during the 1950s and early 1960s in an Italian American neighborhood called Collinwood on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio. While the neighborhood had plenty of conformity, there was also sufficient forbearance for enough deviance to make life interesting and educational.

Years later in the early to mid-1970s, I found myself a Ph.D. student in a seminar on the works of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. I was pleasantly surprised that the lesson I learned growing up was one of Durkheim’s important sociological insights into our common life.

Durkheim showed that deviance performs at least four important functions in society. It affirms our cultural values and norms; clarifies our moral boundaries; brings us together; and encourages social change by challenging our views. Moreover, our neighborhood was a good example of what’s called the Durkheim Constant: there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior that a community will tolerate since deviant behavior causes conflict.  

Many years later in 1993, I read a now-famous essay by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York titled Defining Deviancy Down who based his article on Durkheim’s insight into deviance. Moynihan wrote mostly about crime in America: “We have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard.”

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Chester E. Finn, Jr., suggests that today’s controversy about the recalibration of the College Board’s Advanced Placement exam scores is an educational example of Moynihan’s essay about our human predisposition to define deviancy down.

The Advanced Placement Controversy

The College Board Advanced Placement program is often described as the gold standard for high school academic excellence. High school students take college-level courses and exams in 39 subjects from Biology to Music Theory. Tests are typically composed of multiple-choice and essay questions and scored on a scale of 1–5. Depending on the college, students who earn at least a 3 can earn college credit, “place out” of certain college course requirements, or have AP scores transfer directly to credit hours.

In 2022, the College Board revised the expert panel scoring process for AP exams because student success rates in some AP subjects were well under the 60% to 80% success rate of other subjects. That lower success rate produced a significant disconnect in these subject areas between AP scores and college grades. The College Board claimed that this revised scoring process would get all AP exams to that 60% to 80% success rate and better align all AP exam scores to equivalent college grades.   

While the College Board did inform the AP community at its conferences about this change, there was no formal public announcement made about the undertaking. The Board has now gone public and released a public update on the scoring process. They describe two reasons for taking this action, which they dubbed evidence-based standard setting.

First, new digital data collection technologies make it possible to collect and analyze large amounts of data. Second, these technologies allow them to create a new digital library of courses—the AP Classroom—linking each AP course’s units, topics, learning objectives, and skills to exam questions that produce granular student performance data that allow for more accurate exam scoring. Here is a description of what they did:    

…from 2022-2024, researchers applied evidence-based standard setting (EBSS) processes to determine appropriate performance standards for students in a range of AP courses. This methodology collects input from hundreds of experts and then assembles fine-grained student performance data for analysis by subject-matter experts.

This process produced a significant increase in average student scores in several AP exams, primarily in humanities subjects. For example, the EBSS process increased the success rate for AP English Literature from 43.9% in 2021 to 77.9% in 2022. The individual student score levels in English Literature increased, going from 12% to 27% earning a 4, and from fewer than 5% to 16% earning a 5. The overall effect on 9 AP exams over the last three years is that a 3 or better score was achieved by approximately a half million more students.

The Reaction

Liam Knox, writing in Inside Higher Ed, documents reports that many AP stakeholders support the new approach. On the other hand, not everyone is pleased. These views are summarized in articles with headlines like “Grade Inflation Sends AP Test Scores Soaring” and “Are AP Exams Getting Easier?”

John Moscatello is a leading questioner of this recalibration process. He is the founder of Macro Learning company and works with school districts creating AP programs. He writes that the AP program “…is undergoing a radical transformation” and that the recalibration process has created “runaway [grade] inflation.”

He and other critics point out that while there may be sound academic research to support this change in how exams are scored, the effort has lacked public transparency leaving many AP teachers and supporters confused.

But there are other not-so-sound issues to consider beyond the lack of public transparency. For example, the number of students taking the AP has grown by leaps and bounds, creating a large revenue source for the College Board. Dana Goldstein writing in the New York Times reports that the AP program generated almost $500 million in 2022 revenue for the College Board, calculating that around 20% of that comes from federal, state, and local public dollars. Additionally, some states offer bonuses and salary increases to teachers when their students get a 3 or higher on an AP exam. “Higher scores are good for business” on multiple levels, Moscatello writes.

A Way Forward

“We are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us,” writes Moynihan in the essay I reference at the beginning of this piece. He then goes on to reflect that societies and organizations under stress seek ways of killing their pain.

Maybe we have reached Durkheim’s constant, the proverbial limit to the amount of deviant behavior that a community will tolerate. Or there may be legitimate reasons for the College Board’s new AP scoring approach.

But it seems common sense that what we need is a lot more transparency on the part of the College Board. That might go a long way to assuring AP program supporters that this new approach is not just a way of defining deviancy down to kill the pain brought on by various forces putting the organization under stress.