What changed in AP Statistics for 2027

The four changes worth knowing

College Board rebuilt AP Statistics for the 2026-27 school year. The Course and Exam Description is titled effective Fall 2026, and the first exam on the redesigned course is May 2027. Four changes account for almost everything you need to adjust.

1. Nine units became five. The redesigned course has 5 units covering 55 topics in total.
2. Five entries were removed from the course. Analyzing departures from linearity, combining random variables, the geometric distribution, the chi-square goodness of fit test, and the whole of the old Unit 9, Inference for Quantitative Data: Slopes. The first of those is the one people over-read: what went is transforming data to straighten a curve, not spotting the curve in the first place.
3. The exam becomes fully digital. College Board states that the May 2027 exam will transition from hybrid digital to fully digital, with all student responses submitted through the Bluebook testing app.
4. The exam is 3 hours, split evenly. Section I is 42 multiple-choice questions in 90 minutes and Section II is four free-response questions in 90 minutes, each section worth 50% of your score.

Points 2 and 3 come from the College Board AP Statistics future revisions page. Points 1 and 4 come from the official Course and Exam Description effective Fall 2026, which is also the source for every unit title, weighting and topic code on this site.

Everything below is one of those two documents, restated. Where a question cannot be answered from either, this page says so instead of guessing.

Nine units became five

Here is the whole course as it now stands: five units holding 55 topics between them.

The units guide carries the weightings, the pacing and all 55 topic codes. The unit pages have the topic lists one unit at a time: Unit 1, Unit 2, Unit 3, Unit 4, and Unit 5.

Two structural points fall straight out of that list, and both are specific to the redesign. Data collection sits inside Unit 1, at topics 1.10 to 1.13, next to one-variable descriptive statistics, so sampling, bias and experimental design are part of the heaviest unit in the course rather than a unit of their own. And regression is compressed into a single five-topic unit, the smallest in the course by topic count.

One thing this site deliberately does not publish is a topic-by-topic crosswalk from the old nine units to the new five. The old Course and Exam Description is not a source in hand here, so any such map would be written from memory. What College Board did state about the old course is the removal list, and that is the subject of the next section.

What is no longer on the exam

The revisions page attaches an old topic number to each of the five removals: analyzing departures from linearity at 2.9, combining random variables at 4.9, the geometric distribution at 4.12, goodness of fit at 8.2 and 8.3, and the whole of Unit 9.

Those numbers are old numbers. They index the nine-unit course, not the one you are taking, and two of them collide with live topics in the new framework: topic 2.9 is now Parameters of Random Variables and topic 4.9 is now Setting Up a Test for the Difference Between Two Population Means. The other three point at nothing, because Unit 4 stops at 4.10 and the course has five units. Read the list as though it indexed current codes and you would delete two topics that are still examined while hunting for three that do not exist.

One removal carries a trap worth stating plainly. The old topic 2.9 covered re-expressing data to straighten a curve, so the Fall 2026 course has no topic on transforming data to achieve linearity. It does not follow that curvature stopped mattering. Detecting a departure from linearity is still assessed under topic 5.4, Residuals, where a curved pattern in a residual plot is the evidence that a linear model is the wrong model. See how to interpret residual plots.

Each removal, what it covered, and what survived it, is set out on what was removed from AP Statistics.

The exam becomes fully digital in May 2027

College Board's wording is that the AP Statistics Exam in May 2027 will transition from hybrid digital to fully digital, with all student responses submitted through the Bluebook testing app.

Read that carefully, because it says two separate things. The first is a change of state: the exam was hybrid digital and becomes fully digital. The second is what fully digital means in practice for you, which is that every response you produce, multiple choice and free response alike, is entered in Bluebook rather than written on paper and shipped away.

That is the entire published detail, and this page will not invent more of it. What it does mean for revision is straightforward: reading a stem, a data table and a graph on one screen is a different skill from working across a printed page, and it is worth practicing in the format you will meet. Is the AP Statistics exam digital? works through the practical consequences, and the exam format page has the full structure.

What the course still contains

The redesign gets described as though the subject were rewritten. Look at the five unit titles and you are looking at a standard statistics course: exploring data and collecting it, probability and random variables, inference for proportions, inference for means, and regression.

Every item below is live content in the Fall 2026 framework, so an older explanation of any of them is still an explanation of something you will be tested on:

• Shape, center, spread and unusual features; boxplots, histograms, the 1.5 IQR rule for outliers.
• Sampling methods, sources of bias, experimental design and the scope of inference you may draw.
• Probability rules, conditional probability, independence, random variables and the binomial distribution.
• The normal distribution, sampling distributions and the central limit theorem.
• Confidence intervals and significance tests for one and two proportions, and for one and two means.
• Chi-square tests for homogeneity and independence.
• Scatterplots, correlation, the least-squares line and residual plots.

What you are handed on the day is set out on the formula sheet, and is the AP Statistics exam digital? covers the rest of exam day.

What this changes about how you revise

Three practical consequences, in the order they will save you time.

Stop revising the removed material. Four of the five removals are self-contained, so cutting them costs you nothing else: goodness of fit, geometric probability, combining random variables, and inference for slopes. The fifth needs the careful version. Cut transformations to achieve linearity, keep reading residual plots for curvature.

Re-weight by the new units. Unit 1 carries the largest multiple-choice share at 20 to 30%, and it includes sampling, bias and experimental design, so a shaky Unit 1 leaks points across the whole section. Unit 5 gets the smallest pacing allowance in the course for the same weight band as Unit 4, which makes it the unit most likely to have been rushed and the cheapest to repair on your own. How to study for AP Statistics turns the weightings into hours.

Check the vintage of everything you study from. This is the expensive one, because a resource built on the nine-unit course is not merely dated, it is wrong about the structure of your exam and about what is on it. Should I use old AP Statistics review books? sets out what to keep and what to bin.

Match on titles, never on codes

So the rule for reading anything written about this course is: match on titles, never on codes. A citation of topic 4.9 looks equally at home in either course, and nothing about the number tells you which one it belongs to. Take the title the source gives, find it in the five unit lists, and let the number go.

The rest of the audit is a job in itself, and it is worth doing properly on anything you plan to study from. For a book you already own, should I use old AP Statistics review books? turns it into a 20-minute pass over the contents page and the index.

Where these facts come from

Every claim above traces to one of two documents, and it is worth knowing which.

The Course and Exam Description, effective Fall 2026. The five unit titles, all 55 topic titles and codes, the multiple-choice weightings, the suggested class periods, and the exam structure: 3 hours, 42 multiple-choice questions in 90 minutes, four free-response questions in 90 minutes, each section 50%, with question 3 designated the inference question. This site transcribes that document rather than paraphrasing it, and the unit and topic pages render straight from the transcription.

The College Board AP Statistics future revisions page. The removal list and the digital transition, at apcentral.collegeboard.org. Those two facts are not in the Course and Exam Description, which is a course framework rather than a changelog, so anyone sourcing them to the framework has not checked.

Two things you will not find on this page, because neither document supports them: a score distribution or curve for the redesigned exam, and a per-unit map from the old nine units to the new five. The May 2025 results that circulate online describe the exam this one replaces. The general course page is AP Statistics on AP Central.