The AP Statistics exam has two sections. Section I gives you 90 minutes for 40 multiple-choice questions, worth half of your score. Section II gives you 90 minutes for six free-response prompts: five standard questions worth 37.5% combined, and one longer investigative task worth 12.5% on its own — each scored holistically from 0 to 4.
Your raw points never go to colleges. The College Board combines your weighted section results into a composite score, then converts that composite to the 1-to-5 scale using a process called equating. Equating adjusts the cutoffs for each year's exam so that a 4 in 2026 represents the same level of mastery as a 4 in 2025, even if one version was slightly harder.
That is why no calculator — including this one — can tell you your exact score in advance. What it can do is map your practice raw scores onto cutoffs from publicly released past exams, which is precise enough to set a realistic target and to spot the section where extra points are cheapest for you.
The investigative task deserves special respect: it is a single prompt worth one-eighth of your entire exam, it always pushes you to apply ideas in a context you have not seen before, and it is graded on the same 0-4 scale as questions half its weight. Budgeting 25-30 minutes for it is standard advice from AP readers.
