College Board, the nonprofit organization that develops and administrates Advanced Placement (AP) courses and other types of exams, has announced that major revisions will be made to next year’s AP Statistics test. According to the College Board, the changes set are intended to help align the course with introductory college-level statistics courses.
One of the most important updates is the restructuring of the course content. The current structure includes nine units whereas the revision will condense it to only five. This will allow teachers to focus more deeply on the key concepts. In addition, topics like the geometric distribution, and chi-square goodness of fit tests will be removed.
“Removing topics like chi-square inference and geometric distributions might simplify the course too much,” says AP Stats Student Sophia Zheng (‘26). Zheng expressed concern that future courses would “not cover everything needed to understand statistics.”
“My initial reaction was a little bit of shock, just because if it’s not broken, I don’t see the point in fixing it,” said Bertsos. “Some of the changes are good, but others, like removing certain distributions, don’t really seem necessary.”
The exam format will also change. The multiple choice section will increase from 40 to 42 questions, while the number of answer choices will decrease from five to four. The free response portion will also be reduced from six questions to four, but each question will be worth more points. “I feel like we study more for the free-response questions, so having fewer but more heavily weighted ones could actually be a good thing,” said AP Statistics teacher Nicholas Bertsos.
The revised exam will also have a stronger emphasis on skills like formulating questions, collecting and analyzing data, and also interpreting results. Some of the free response questions will directly target these skills.
In addition to content changes, the course will also no longer require a second year of algebra as a prerequisite. This would make AP Statistics more accessible to more students.
The CollegeBoard plans to release additional resources and training for teachers throughout 2026, to support this new transition.
