AP Macroeconomics

Advanced Placement Macroeconomics (also known as AP Macroeconomics, AP Macro, APMa, or simply Macro) is an Advanced Placement macroeconomics course for high school students culminating in an exam offered by the College Board.

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Study begins with fundamental economic concepts such as scarcity, opportunity costs, production possibilities, specialization, comparative advantage, demand, supply, and price determination.

Major topics include measurement of economic performance, national income and price determination, fiscal and monetary policy, and international economics and growth. AP Macroeconomics is frequently taught in conjunction with (and, in some cases, in the same year as) AP Microeconomics, although more students take the former.

Topic outline

Basic Economic Concepts (8–12%)

Measurement of Economic Performance (12–16%)

National Income and Price Determination (10–15%)

Financial Sector (15–20%)

Financial sector:

Inflation, Unemployment, and Stabilization Policies (20–30%)

Economic Growth and Productivity (5–10%)

Open Economy: International Trade and Finance (10–15%)

Exam

Multiple Choice (2/3 of Score)
  • 60 Questions in 70 Minutes
  • Reflects Topic Outline Above
  • Example: 3-6 Questions on Economic Growth.

Free Response (1/3 of Score)
  • 3 Questions in 60 Minutes (with 10 minutes of recommended reading and planning time)

Score distribution

The exam was first held in 1989, along with Microeconomics. Grade distributions since 2008 are as follows:

Score 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015[1] 2016[2] 2017[3] 2018[4] 2019[5] 2020[6]
5 13.1% 13.9% 14.6% 16.1% 13.8% 16.1% 16.4% 18.2% 17.6% 19.5%
4 24.0% 23.9% 23.2% 23.2% 22.0% 23.4% 23.1% 22.5% 22.9% 24.8%
3 16.7% 18.0% 16.6% 18.5% 17.3% 16.2% 17.2% 16.7% 17.4% 18.3%
2 18.2% 17.8% 19.1% 17.5% 17.5% 17.5% 16.2% 17.3% 15.3% 16.2%
1 28.0% 26.3% 26.6% 24.7% 29.4% 26.8% 27.1% 25.3% 26.9% 21.2%
% of scores 3 or higher 53.8% 55.8% 54.4% 57.8% 53.1% 55.7% 56.7% 57.4% 57.9% 62.6%
Mean 2.76 2.81 2.80 2.89 2.73 2.85 2.86 2.91 2.89 3.05
Standard deviation 1.42 1.41 1.43 1.42 1.43 1.45 1.45 1.46 1.47 1.43
Number of Students 90,134[7] 99,903[8] 108,219[9] 117,209[10] 126,267 138,638 141,649[11] 146,673

Criticism

Tawni Ferrarini, James Gwartney, and John Morton have written that the examination does not adequately cover recent advances in the field: "The AP macroeconomics exam and resources largely reflect the simplistic Keynesian view from the 1960s and 1970s."[12] The College Board updates the AP Macroeconomics curriculum with the guidance of college and high school economics instructors. The most recent update was published in 2019.[13]

gollark: Fear Lemmmy's predictive algorithms.
gollark: Lemmmy has an accursed spreadsheet fed by even more accursed NBT crawler tools which somehow determine total storage use.
gollark: The documentation CANNOT be trusted, and I know, I used kbps.
gollark: And clearly must store 44MiB of audio data, or 46MB.
gollark: They don't distinguish between raw data and audio data.

See also

References
  1. Registration, Total. "2015 AP Exam Score Distributions".
  2. Total Registration. "2016 AP Exam Score Distributions". www.totalregistration.net. Retrieved 2016-07-01.
  3. Registration, Total. "2017 AP Exam Score Distributions". www.totalregistration.net. Retrieved 2017-06-11.
  4. "2018 Student Score Distributions" (PDF).
  5. https://twitter.com/AP_Trevor/status/1138836147877142533
  6. Total Registration (2020-07-08). "2020 AP Exam Score Distributions". www.totalregistration.net. Retrieved 2020-07-08.
  7. http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/2011_MacroEconomics_Score_Dist.pdf
  8. http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/ap12_econ_macro_ScoringDist.pdf
  9. http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/apcentral/ap13_econ_macro_ScoringDist.pdf
  10. http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/apcentral/ap14-macroeconomics-score-dist.pdf
  11. https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/research/2017/Student-Score-Distributions-2017.pdf
  12. Tawni H. Ferrarini, James D. Gwartney, and John S. Morton, "Advanced Placement Economics: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," Econ Journal Watch 8(1) (January 2011), 67.
  13. College Board, AP Economics Course and Exam Description (2019).

Study Resources
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