Advanced Placement Test Apps

Need Some AP Test Prep? These $40 Apps May Help

High school students at more than 18,000 schools are preparing for May's Advanced Placement exams, which bestow college credit upon high scorers.

Now Macmillan's adaptive learning startup is preparing to market its study tools directly to those students for the first time.

The company Prep-U is launching AP test-prep apps for US History, AP Chemistry and AP Psychology on Thursday.

Based on technology previously sold as an online study companion to textbooks, the apps first determine a student's current mastery level through a series of quizzes. Thereafter, they serve up quiz questions at that level.

The idea is to never ask a question the student already knows for sure or one that will completely stump them, thereby focusing attention where it's needed.

As students progress, they'll get harder questions. They can track their progress in each category of expertise on a dashboard. If teachers assign the app, they can check in on students' progress as well.

Prep-U's technology is based on a theory most commonly referred to as adaptive learning. It's a system around which — as Barbara Rifkind, an independent consultant who advises education enterprises and a former vice president at Pearson Education, put it in a November interview — “There’s relatively little controversy in theory."

The idea of adjusting questions for individual students' levels is something most textbook publishers, as well as several startups, are dabbling in. In November, Pearson announced it would be integrating startup Knewton's adaptive learning technology in more than 750 textbook titles.

McGraw-Hill has an adaptive learning product called LearnSmart complete with mobile apps, and a startup called Grockit surrounds an individualized test-prep learning path with social features.

Prep-U previously powered textbook companions for third-party textbook companies. It says 98,700 students purchased its technology for $20 as part of their required college course materials.

Each AP test prep app will cost $40, and Prep-U will develop the content — between 1600 and 3600 questions — without the help of a third-party publisher. The new apps' success depends on whether students are willing to pay for the apps without necessarily being required to do so.

"We believe there’s a market direct-to-student," Troy Williams, a vice president at global publisher Macmillan, says. "We’re willing to invest to build this ourselves."

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