Celebrating Griffin AP Exam Results
Dear Griffin School Community,
I hope everyone is enjoying summer break and using this time away from the school-year routines to do the things that make you feel rested, healthy, and strong! There is still a full month before the new year begins, and I encourage you to use this time to start or restart the life habits - routines of sleep, diet, exercise, social connections, personal enrichment - that will carry you through the fall semester feeling balanced and enriched. Start one new thing now, and by the time school begins, it will be embedded in your schedule as a positive habit. For me, I'm trying to keep up with daily exercise and read at least a few pages of a book every night to wind down to sleep. Good luck with whatever you are trying to instill in your life.
Last week, the 2026 Advanced Placement (AP) scores were released, and I want to share some highlights. Students can access your own individual scores via your College Board account. Parents, you have access through your student's account, so work with them to view scores.
It's important to note that we measure student success through a variety of means and we always want to keep the focus on a student living up to their own personal potential. College Board AP coursework and test scores are only one part of a student's high school life and may or may not be an important part of their academic goals. The scores themselves are useful as a way to measure against a norms-based assessment, but any individual scores may mean different things for different students. Just noting that the data is interesting, but we want to make sure it is not defining for a student's sense of achievement as a student and certainly not as a person in the world. There are far more important things in life than AP scores - kindness, compassion, integrity, creativity to name a few.
Okay, with all of that context provided, we are extremely proud of Griffin School students' AP results - they are excellent across the board! A few data points I can share:
Background about the AP Program:
• Griffin School offered 18 AP courses last year, most geared toward 11th and 12th grade students. (AP World History is the only course geared toward 10th graders; otherwise it is rare for 9th and 10 students to take an AP courses although some who are advanced in a world language or their math track may.)
• AP courses are designed to provide students with the rigor and expectations of introductory college-level coursework while they are still in high school.
• AP exams are scored on a scale of 1 to 5. A score of 3 is generally considered qualified and may earn college credit or placement at many colleges and universities, while scores of 4 (well qualified) and 5 (extremely well qualified) demonstrate even higher levels of mastery. Each college sets its own policies regarding AP credit and placement, so the score needed to earn credit varies by institution.
Access to AP Coursework:
• 107 Griffin students took AP courses last year including :
• 40 seniors (93%)
• 42 juniors (100%)
• 22 sophomores
• 4 freshmen
Volume of Courses/Exams:
• 296 AP exams were administered at Griffin School this year
• 77 students took 2 or more AP Courses
• 53 students took 3 or more AP Courses
• 37 students took 4 or more AP Courses
• 11 students took 5 or more AP Courses
• 1 student even took 6 AP Courses!
• It's worth noting that some courses - like AP Physics C - have two tests. With that in mind, we had four students who took 6 distinct AP tests at the end of the year.
AP Exam Scores:
• The average score across all Griffin School AP exams was 3.8
• 88% of exam scores were a 3 or higher!
• 64% of exam scores were a 4 or 5!
These results represent an immense amount of commitment and hard work from Griffin School students. They represent an extremely high level of excellence from Griffin School faculty. A special shout out goes out to our Director of Academics Lawrence Morgan and our Director of College Counseling, Patrick Firme - both are instrumental in the design and functioning of the academic and AP program at Griffin! Congratulations to the students, faculty, and staff members who supported the learning process and the academic program at-large at Griffin School last year! We have a lot to be proud of here!
Happy Summertime,
Adam