If the course is provided by their school, students normally take AP Statistics in their junior or senior year and may decide to take it concurrently with a pre-calculus course. This offering is intended to imitate a one-semester, non-calculus based college statistics course, but high schools can decide to offer the course over one semester, two trimesters, or a full academic year.
The six-member AP Statistics Test Development Committee is responsible for developing the curriculum. Appointed by the College Board, the committee consists of three college statistics teachers and three high school statistics teachers who are typically asked to serve for terms of three years.
Curriculum
Emphasis is placed not on actual arithmetic computation, but rather on conceptual understanding and interpretation. The coursecurriculum is organized around four basic themes; the first involves exploring data and covers 20–30% of the exam. Students are expected to use graphical and numerical techniques to analyze distributions of data, including univariate, bivariate, and categorical data. The second theme involves planning and conducting a study and covers 10–15% of the exam. Students must be aware of the various methods of data collection through sampling or experimentation and the sorts of conclusions that can be drawn from the results. The third theme involves probability and its role in anticipating patterns in distributions of data. This theme covers 20–30% of the exam. The fourth theme, which covers 30–40% of the exam, involves statistical inference using point estimation, confidence intervals, and significance tests.