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What is a 5 actually worth?

Every college answers that question differently, buries the answer in a registrar PDF, and changes it without telling anyone. We read 84,366 of those published rules across 2,027 colleges. Enter your scores and see what each one gives you.

84,366
published award rules
2,027
colleges
46
AP exams
1

Enter your AP scores

2

Pick the colleges on your list

optional

Add an exam above and the answer appears here — no account, no email.

What this tool does and does not know

  • Every row comes from a policy the college publishes. Where a college publishes no rule for one of your exams, we say so — we never turn missing information into a zero.
  • We resolve the any-major rule. Colleges that award differently by school or major publish those separately, and an engineering or nursing program may not accept what the general catalog does.
  • Credit hours are not comparable between colleges. Semester hours, quarter hours, and course-unit systems all appear here as their own published numbers.
  • Dollar figures are an estimate: published annual tuition divided by 30 credits. A college that bills a flat full-time rate charges the same whether you arrive with credit or not — there the real saving is a shorter degree.
  • Policies change. Confirm against the college's own page before you commit.

AP credit is one line of the decision. The College Plan is the rest of it.

Same data discipline, applied to your whole list: what each college actually costs your family at your income, which scholarships you qualify for, every deadline, and the essays. One price, through May 1 of senior year.

See the College Plan

Why this is hard to look up

The College Board publishes which colleges accept AP credit. It does not publish what each one awards, because that is the college's decision, not theirs. So the real answer lives on ~2,000 separate registrar pages, in ~2,000 different formats, and a family comparing five colleges has to find and read five of them.

That gap matters in dollars. A student sitting five exams in junior and senior year is making a real bet — roughly $100 an exam plus a year of harder coursework — without knowing the payoff at the schools they are applying to. The answer changes the bet: at some colleges a 4 in Biology is a semester of general-education credit, at others it is placement into a harder class and nothing else, and at a few it is nothing at all.

We scraped the policies so the comparison takes ten seconds instead of an afternoon. Everything here is the college's own published number, linked back to its own page.

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