Playing the Percentages: Do Students Chase Easy A’s When the AP Premium Fades?

• In Event: Contemporary Policy Impacts on Students' High School Experiences

Abstract

Enrolling in an advanced coursework shapes the content a student learns, the peers she interacts with, the signals her transcript sends to colleges, and the set of future courses available to her. A growing body of work suggests that curricular choices can have lasting effects on college enrollment, field of study, and earnings (Altonji, 1995; Rose and Betts, 2004; Goodman, 2019). Yet, we know relatively little about what drives course selection and how institutional factors shape those decisions.

The effect of grading standards on course selection has been studied in postsecondary settings, demonstrating that students select courses based on grading policies (Sabot and Wakeman-Linn,1991; Bar, Kadiyali, and Zussman, 2009) and indicating that there may be gender differences in selection behavior (Ahn, Arcidiacono, Hopson, and Thomas, 2024). Evidence at the high school level remains scarce, even though course-taking decisions made early in students’ trajectories have compounding effects.

In this paper, we examine course-taking behavior in high school by exploiting a 2014 statewide reform in North Carolina that simultaneously (i) lowered the numeric score thresholds required for each letter grade and (ii) compressed the GPA premium awarded for taking advanced (Honors, AP/IB) courses. Together, these changes altered two margins that matter for course selection: reducing the difficulty (marginal cost) of earning a high grade within any course and reducing the relative GPA reward (marginal benefit) for choosing higher difficultly courses.

Using NCERDC administrative student-level data spanning 2013–2019, we estimate a difference-in-discontinuity design following Bowden et al. (2025). On average, we do not find effects of the grading scale change on course-taking outcomes, including total enrollment, math courses, or the number of AP and Honors courses taken. These null average effects are consistent with the two reform components pushing in opposite directions: lower grading thresholds may encourage students to attempt harder courses, while the compressed GPA premium reduces the credential value.

Joint tests of significance show impacts vary significantly across student achievement levels (p < 0.05). Our results suggest that high- and middle-achieving students take fewer AP courses, while high-achieving students increased honors course enrollment. We plan to examine differences based on subject, socioeconomic status, race, and gender. We will also explore changes in course availability and explore long-term consequences of behavior shifts.

Author

• Brooks Bowden, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author