What Is an Advanced Placement Test?
The Advanced Placement Test is a test meant to measure where high school students who have taken Advanced Placement courses are in their education, in order to place them in the appropriate classes when they go to college in the U.S. Although intended to work in tandem with special classes, the Advanced Placement Test can be taken by any high school students, including those who are home schooled or part of a charter school. The purpose of the Advanced Placement Test is to allow students who have already acquired a body of knowledge to skip taking introductory college courses which would simply be going over that same information again. The first Advanced Placement Tests were administered in the 1950s, as a result of a study run by the Ford Foundation. The study found that students in their senior year of high school were in many cases prepared to be taking college-level courses, and that their senior year could best be spent taking at least a handful of college-level courses at their
