Question appeared in online practice quiz, never on ‘actual AP Exam’: spokesperson
The College Board has removed a practice exam question that recently caught flak online for equating female empowerment with low birth rates, a spokesperson told The College Fix.
The question, highlighted in a recent X post by Belmont Abbey College faculty fellow Jeremy Tate, asked students to examine a chart with birth and death rates in five countries and choose which data best represented “a high level of female empowerment.”
The answer was France, which had the lowest birth rate, according to Tate. The question came from an Advanced Placement Human Geography online practice quiz.
This is a screenshot from College Board’s AP platform, featuring questions for AP Human Geography.
The correct answer is France, because they have the lowest birth rate.
College Board is teaching your kids a sign of female empowerment=less babies.
Gloves off! 👊 pic.twitter.com/wASt2HuQCK
— Jeremy Wayne Tate (@JeremyTate41) July 26, 2024
College Board spokesperson Sara Sympson told The Fix in a recent email the question was “inaccurate” and it was removed. The nonprofit organization produces the SAT and Advanced Placement tests.
“In November 2023, we removed this inaccurate AP Human Geography practice question about the Gender Inequality Index from our website and then reviewed our processes to determine how we failed to prevent it from being posted as a practice question,” Sympson said.
Sympson told The Fix the organization also “issued a formal apology for the process error that resulted in this inaccurate question appearing on our website. It has never appeared on an actual AP Exam.”
However, the question, which follows past concerns scholars have raised about ideological issues influencing College Board tests, continues to face criticism.
“Education can never be ‘values neutral,’” Tate told The Fix in an email last week.
Tate runs Classic Learning Test, which offers alternative standardized testing focused on “knowledge and virtue.” He also serves as a trustee of the Catholic Institute of Technology in Italy.
The recently-removed question shows “the College Board has embraced an impoverished version of feminism which is profoundly anti-woman and anti-child. It comes as no shock they are using their assessments to push this extreme ideology on young minds,” he said.
It also is another example of the anti-family messaging coming out of higher education, Tate told The Fix.
“Mainstream academia has lost a vision for human flourishing which must always include an openness to life and a sacred respect for the most vulnerable among us, children,” Tate, who is Catholic, said.
“This messaging is the result of a wholesale embrace of a modern understanding of freedom defined as personal autonomy to do whatever our impulses tell us rather than the classical understanding of human freedom understood as freedom from vice in order to do good,” he told The Fix.
He added, “Absolutely nothing is gained by this anti-natalist propaganda. The only serious gain I see is that this kind of insanity speeds up the timeline of CLT replacing the College Board entirely.”
The College Board has faced similar criticism in the past. Scholars have accused the organization of “undermining” American history, implementing and subsequently taking back an “adversity score” for the SAT, and refusing to revise courses to follow state law.
MORE: Education scholars criticize College Board for revising history
IMAGE: Alena Ozerova/Shutterstock
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