Atlanta Public Schools students posted their strongest Advanced Placement exam results on record this year, with the district's share of qualifying scores climbing from 60% to 61% and every single school with AP results showing improvement.
The district reported record achievement on Advanced Placement exams, according to 95.5 WSB, which reported that qualifying scores — those of 3, 4 or 5 on the College Board's five-point scale — rose from 60% in 2025 to 61%. Every Atlanta Public Schools campus that recorded AP exam results increased its number of qualifying scores, the outlet reported, and the district also has more students taking AP courses and tests than before, with expanded access opening the door for more students to take on the challenge.
Those qualifying scores matter beyond a report card. A 3, 4 or 5 can be used toward college credits, which can ease the financial burden on families paying for higher education down the line.
District Leaders Point to Preparation and Higher Expectations
Forrestella Taylor, an Atlanta Public Schools associate superintendent, credited the gains to a combination of preparation, encouragement and teachers readying students for the rigor of AP coursework. Taylor said schools across the district are seeing improvements, and added that all Atlanta Public Schools campuses increased the number of students who accessed and engaged in AP courses. She also said higher expectations are helping support student achievement, framing the districtwide gains as the product of sustained effort rather than a one-year fluke.
Atlanta Public Schools students have seen both increased access to AP courses and increased participation in them, a trend that mirrors what's happening with AP testing more broadly. Nationally, the number of Black students participating in AP grew 28% between 2015 and 2025, according to College Board data, and Black students earned 179,490 credit-qualifying AP exam scores in 2025 — 117% more than a decade earlier. Latino students saw an even steeper climb, earning 685,598 credit-qualifying scores in 2025, up 139% from 2015.
How Other Georgia Districts Are Faring
Atlanta Public Schools isn't the only district in the state touting AP gains this year. Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools saw its successful completion rate — the share of exams earning a 3 or higher — jump from 64.9% in 2024 to 70.3% in 2025, a gain of 5.4 percentage points, per the Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools district. Of the 2,007 AP exams taken by the Savannah-Chatham Class of 2025, 1,410 yielded a qualifying score.
Statewide, Georgia's Class of 2025 also improved: 24.9% of graduating seniors earned a 3 or higher on an AP exam, up from 22.3% for the Class of 2024, the district noted. Participation climbed too, with 37.3% of Georgia's Class of 2025 taking at least one AP exam during high school compared with 35.9% the year before. Because these figures track different populations and denominators than the Atlanta Public Schools numbers, they aren't a direct apples-to-apples comparison, but they point to a similar statewide pattern of rising AP engagement.
Access to AP coursework itself has been expanding across the country. In the 2024-25 school year, 79% of public high school students attended high schools offering at least five AP courses, according to College Board figures, underscoring how broader course offerings have coincided with the participation gains schools like Atlanta Public Schools are now reporting.
