Here are some tips for grading AP Stats assessments.  Maintain high expectations.  Be picky.  Students will be graded on the AP Exam for their understanding of content as well as their clear communication.  Students will need to be trained how to clearly communicate their understanding.

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On one question, students were given a pictograph and asked to identify why it is misleading.  Students who wrote “because it is a pictograph” did not receive full credit.  In order to receive full credit, students have to address the fact that taller pictographs are also wider or that the areas are deceiving.

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Students struggled with distinguishing between joint relative frequencies and conditional relative frequencies.  It takes practice to be able to read a question and identify when a condition is given.  This idea will be revisited more thoroughly in Chapter 5 in the context of conditional probability.

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Be sure to check that students are including context when they describe a distribution.  They only need to address context once in an answer (they don’t have to include context for shape, center, variability, and outliers).

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When students are comparing two distributions, be sure that they are compare, rather than list.  Students might want to simply list out the shape, center, variability, and outliers for each distribution.  This is not enough.  They must use comparative words (less than, greater than, similar to) for full credit.  Also, it is not necessary for them to have numerical values for measures of center or measures of variability.