The Advanced Placement Program announced curriculum and exam changes to AP Physics and AP Psychology courses that will take effect for this school year on March 1.
These modifications have forced teachers to update lesson plans from years past, according to the College Board.
AP Physics teacher Miles Martin and AP Psychology teacher Brett Kramer have varying opinions about the changes.
“I don’t think the previous curriculum had any problems,” Kramer said. “I thought it was great.”
However, Martin thinks the curriculum changes align with the updating of the regularly changing science field and approves of the new course revisions.
“Science is always slow to make some revisions,” Martin said. “I think [the changes were] slow.”
The AP Psychology curriculum has been condensed from nine units into five: biological, cognitive, developmental, personality and physical health.
In addition to these curriculum changes, the AP Psychology course is now counted as a science course and a social science course to allow for more college credits.
AP Physics program revisions were made to all four AP Physics courses, including the two provided at East — AP Physics and AP Physics 2. Along with other minor changes, AP Physics 1 gained an extra unit to the previous seven, called fluids, previously taught in AP Physics 2.
With the subtraction of fluids from AP Physics 2, the units have been renumbered with the units now starting at nine at the beginning of the year to follow the eighth and final AP Physics 1 unit.
A class called ‘Advanced Placement Summer Institute’ was held over the summer to give teachers more resources and information about the changes. Martin learned that the new curriculum is going from strict calculations to having students draw, model, calculate and then communicate what they just did.
“For example…[in class] I had a lot of discussion about what does a position time graph look like, no numbers,” Martin said.
Along with the curriculum changes to both AP courses, the revisions to the May 2025 AP exams have also affected how Martin and Kramer plan to prepare their students for the test.
“The writing portion of the [AP Psychology] test is significantly more intense than it was in the previous curriculum,” Kramer said. “It’ll require teaching how to write answers to [the AP exam questions] more so than it did in the past.”
The AP Psychology exam will now include two new free-response questions, article analysis questions and evidence-based questions. According to the College Board, this will help assess a student’s ability to develop a broader range of writing, problem solving and other important skills.
Kramer plans to give students various writing prompts to lay out the foundation of what the writing portion of the exam will look like. He plans to use repetition throughout the year to make students feel more comfortable writing.
With the curriculum and exam changes to AP Psychology, students, including senior Hartley Graham, have started Kramer’s new curriculum based activities.
“We had our first test, kind of early, and it was open note but it was still kind of hard because it was about research techniques, and that was just something I’d struggle with because although it is a social studies class [it is still] bio-based,” Graham said.
The revised AP Physics 1 and 2 exams will no longer have multi-select questions and will instead add new question types to the free-response questions.
Similarly, Martin is changing his day-to-day activities with the new curriculum but has a different objective — communication. He believes that if you can teach the person next to you about physics, you demonstrate a higher level of learning.
“[O]ne of the things about students [is] they can go through, and they can do the math, but they can’t talk to anyone,” Martin said. “[O]ne of the skills that students need is communication, especially when they get out into the workforce.”
In 2022, AP Psychology also underwent revisions to the curriculum and the AP Physics courses get major curriculum changes every five to 10 years. The AP Program will continue to revise the AP course structures in the future to ensure the class skills and content requirements are met.
“I think [students will] struggle early on because many of their peers or siblings who took AP Psychology from me under the previous curriculum, and they’ll talk to each other,” Kramer said. “Under this testing, it’s more up in the air, so that poses a challenge.”
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