Massachusetts Advanced Placement Data: Course Offerings and Exam Counts by School, Subject, and Student Subgroup, 2007-2021

This dataset contains school-by-year records from Massachusetts traditional public secondary schools between 2006-07 and 2020-2021. Variables include demographic and directory information, Advanced Placement course offerings, and Advanced Placement exam counts by student subgroup The accompanying code runs the analyses described in "New Advanced Placement Course Designed to Broaden Participation Increases Access and Demographic Diversity in Computer Science Education" by Daniela Ganelin and Thomas Dee. The paper's abstract is provided below.

Advanced Placement (AP) provides college-level courses to over 1 million U.S. secondary students annually. Black, Hispanic, and female students have historically been underrepresented in AP Computer Science (CS). A new, broadly focused course—AP CS Principles—launched nationally in 2016-17 with the goal of increasing participation and diversity. We examine its effects on AP Computer Science participation. Combining publicly available sources, we assemble a panel dataset of annual AP exam-taking and course offerings from 2006-07 to 2020-21 at Massachusetts high schools. Using synthetic difference-in-differences, we estimate that offering the new course led to 16 additional yearly AP Computer Science exams at each school, more than tripling baseline exam counts at adopting schools. Exam counts among female and Black or Hispanic students more than quadrupled. The new exams were concentrated in AP Computer Science Principles, with no statistically significant reduction in exam counts for the preexisting AP CS course. We also estimate that offering the new course increased schools’ probability of having any AP CS exam participation by 29 percentage points, with larger gains for female and Black or Hispanic students. We find some evidence of positive spillover effects on several other AP courses. The results suggest the promise of course design and availability in promoting engagement and diversity in advanced STEM education.