Georgetown Day, Holton-Arms, Landon, Maret, National Cathedral, Potomac School, St. Albans, and Sidwell Friends.

Since 2002, a growing number of excellent and well-known boarding and day schools have reassessed their reliance on AP courses and testing and eliminated the AP designation, with overall positive results. Their experience helped inform our decision, which is explained more thoroughly in our AP Decision Rationale.

Believing colleges expect them to take AP designated courses, students are less apt to register for other courses of equal or greater difficulty that simply do not carry the AP brand. We believe we can offer more relevant, meaningful coursework that will better assist students in developing 21st-century research and analytical skills and encourage them to experiment with creative approaches to problem solving.

No, some schools already have eliminated APs, and some will be eliminating them over time. All eight schools have committed to ending the AP designation after 2022/23.

AP courses will be offered through the 2022­/23 school year. Beginning in the 2023/24 school year, AP courses will no longer be offered.

Sidwell Friends will continue to administer AP tests through 2022/23. Thereafter, we will consider student interest in the tests to determine whether to continue administering them.

No. Sidwell Friends does not currently offer AP test preparation.

Yes. We will continue to offer financial aid to students who wish to take the tests.

Our faculty offer and are excited to expand offerings of courses as rigorous and complex as those designated AP. We hope and expect students will explore a variety of engaging classes that speak to their interests and passions. Students will have more time for research, giving them the opportunity to study topics at greater depth.

The different course levels will be clearly indicated through course nomenclature, and the varying levels of difficulty between courses will be described in the curriculum guide.

We surveyed a large number of colleges and universities that our students attend and have been assured this change will not result in any negative repercussions. Admissions officers have explained that they judge students on the strength of the courses they have taken relative to the rigor of all courses offered at the school. Further, it is standard practice among independent schools to provide colleges with “school profiles” describing the nature of their academic programs and clearly communicating the difficulty of courses in each discipline.

Sidwell Friends college counselors will ensure colleges and universities understand the unique features of our school’s curricula. Schools that have already dropped the AP designation from their courses have had their decisions received enthusiastically by even the most selective colleges.

Student transcripts include course-level designations for accelerated (accel) and advanced (adv) courses, noted in the “level” column next to the course names.

As of the 2023/24 school year, Sidwell Friends will no longer list AP scores on our school profile. Instead, our school profile will include examples of particularly rigorous courses.

Sidwell Friends does not generate GPAs for students, so we do not use grade weighting for AP courses.

AP examination scores, not the presence of AP courses on a transcript, determine what, if any, academic benefit a student will receive. Significantly, many schools are decreasing the credit students are eligible to receive on the basis of AP test scores. Today, few students graduate from college in less than four years. It is exceedingly rare for a student to receive enough credit through AP tests to place out of an entire year of college.

Independent schools have been trending away from AP courses for more than a decade. As a result, like American colleges and universities, foreign institutions to which American students frequently apply also look for rigor rather than an AP designation.