The Controversy Over Just How Much History AP World History Should Cover

Like any Advanced Placement course, AP World History is intense, requiring students to absorb lots of sophisticated, detail-laden information in a relatively short amount of time: usually, a single year of high school. Yet AP World, as it is colloquially called, is a special breed of intense. The timespan the course’s curriculum covers is as expansive as its geographic focus: The material includes history starting around 8,000 B.C.E. and ends in the present—more than 10,000 revolutions around the sun later. This content, which the curriculum divides into six periods, is typically covered over the course of two sequential college classes.

Now, the College Board, the nonprofit testing company that runs (and close to half its annual, part of that are designed to prepare all students for college and will be launched this fall. In rationalizing the AP World changes, the College Board spokesman Zachary Goldberg cited survey and performance data suggesting that too many students and teachers drown in the information overload and ultimately fail to gain value from the course. What’s more, Goldberg said, most colleges only reward who score well enough on the exam with credit for a single semester course—typically one that covers post-1450 C.E. history.