Changes to the AP® Psychology Curriculum

The world of AP Psychology is going through a curricular change. While this has been a works in progress for a number of years, not that the changes are here let’s discuss five upcoming changes to the course that will be reflected in the 2025 AP Psychology exam.

1. Changes to the Multiple Choice: The multiple-choice section will still count for 2/3rds of the overall exam score, but there will be some changes to how Multiple-Choice questions are formatted. Instead of having 5 answer options, there will now be 4 choices which brings the course in alignments to major assessments such as SATs and other newly revised AP courses. There will now be 75 multiple choice questions on the exam (instead of 100). Question stems will likely be longer and there will be more sets. There may be a question about a research study that first asks about a variable in the study, then another question about the data from the study, and yet another about the concept assessed by the study. There will be no more definitional questions. Because of the longer question stems and the need to examine data and read about research, the time for the multiple-choice portion of the exam will move from 70 to 90 minutes.
2. Changes to Science Practices: The skills students will need to master have been modified. There are a total of four sciences practices in the new curriculum. Science practice 1 is concept application which will ask students to identify psychological concepts theories and research findings in situations and practical, real-life settings. Students will also have the identify different types of bias. Science practice 2 will cover research methods and design. This practice will ask students to identify the different components of qualitative and quantitative research methods and study designs and to identify the ethical components when conducting research. Science practice 3 will focus on data interpretation, students will have the identify concepts represented in a graph, figure, table or chart. They will also have to draw conclusions from these stimuli and compute measures of central tendency and measures of variance when presented with a data set. Science practice 4 is new for AP Psychology and will only be tested on the free-response portion of the exam. This practice is Argumentation and involves making a claim and supporting the claim with evidence and knowledge from the field of psychology. Science practice 1 will comprise 65% of the multiple-choice (roughly 49 questions), Science practice 2 25% (roughly 19 questions) and Science practice 3 10% (roughly 7 questions).
3. Article Analysis Question (AAQ): The article analysis question will ask students to analyze a summarized, peer reviewed research article. Each article will contain the components of a research study such as introduction, participants, method, results and discussion. Studies will represent of the following five types of methodologies (case study, naturalistic observation, experiment, correlational study, and meta-analysis). The question will remain the same from year to year allowing for slight modifications based on the type of study presented. Students will be asked about the type of research, the variables in the study, the meaning of the statistical findings, the ethical procedures utilize in the study, the generalizability of the sample, and how the findings support of refute the research hypothesis. There is a recommended reading time of 5 minutes with 15 minutes to write. The AAQ will be worth 7 points, but will be weighted to make up 16.75% of the overall exam score.
4. Evidence Based Question (EBQ): The evidence -based question will focus on science practice 4 argumentation. In this question, students will be asked to examine summaries of three peer reviewed journal articles. The students will then make a claim based on the information they have read and use at least 2 of the 3 sources to support that claim. The must explain how evidence from the 2 sources relates to the claim and then explain how the evidence relates to a concept, theory, of term from AP Psychology. They must repeat the connection of the evidence to the claim and connection to a psychological concept, theory, or term twice and the evidence and term must be different each time. There is a recommended reading time of 15 minutes, with 30 minutes to write. The EBQ will be worth 7 points, but will be weighted to make up 16.75% of the exam. The total FRQ section of the exam will make up 1/3 rd of the overall exam score. Students will have a total of 70 minutes to answer both FRQs.
5. The exam will take place on Bluebook: Bluebook is an app that is used for many types of assessments. Students will download the Bluebook app on their device and they will take the exam in a lockdown browser at their school in a proctored testing environment. The app allows students to go back to questions, annotate, highlight, or underline text and it has a split screen which will allow students to see question and answer options at once for multiple-choice and the articles, prompt and textbox simultaneously for the FRQs. Other AP History and English courses have utilized this app in past years and students will have an opportunity to interact with the platform to better understand what it will look like and what functions are available prior to the exam.
   
   This summary should get you started on what teachers and students will need to know for the upcoming school year to best prepare students for the upcoming changes.