The Demographic Divide in the Advanced Placement Curriculum
In this part, I sought to understand the participation in the different AP subjects among high school and pre-high school students. I analyzed data published by the College Board from the May 2016 AP examination. The data was made available on the Kaggle Platform. I divided the AP subjects into six categories as suggested by the College Board, and computed the preferences for the subjects in each category for four grades of high school and a single group of pre-high school students. I find that the preferences for AP subjects vary dramatically through the four years of high school. Moreover, the preferences in the pre-high school group are definitively different from the four high school grades; with younger students choosing more difficult subjects. I concluded this part by providing detailed insights into these observations, and their implications. I presented this part at the IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference as a full paper, at Princeton University in March, 2018.
I conducted preliminary analysis of the data by computing and visually comparing descriptive statistics, namely, mean and variance of AP scores for each of the 35 AP subjects. I found that juniors/seniors, males/females and white/Asian students score close to each other in many AP subjects. However, the achievement gap between African-Americans and Hispanics and the other two ethnicities is very wide. Based on these observations, I formulated my null hypothesis that the difference between the average AP scores of juniors vs. seniors, males vs. females, and white vs. Asian students is not significant. I tested this null hypothesis using the z-test, at a significance level of 0.05. For the subjects where the z-test rejects the null hypothesis, I also computed Cohen’s d to determine whether the difference is significant but trivial, or significant and non-trivial. My results show that there does exist a demographic divide in AP performance between the sub-groups for each demographic variable.
This project won third place at both the Worcester Regional Science and Engineering Fair, as well as the Massachusetts State Science and Engineering Fair.