AP Statistics FRQ six questions plus the investigative task.

The format at a glance

Section II of the AP Statistics exam is six free-response questions in 90 minutes, worth half of your total score. Five are shorter questions and the sixth is a longer Investigative Task that counts for more.

What each question tests

The short questions move through the four big areas of the course: exploring data with graphs and summary statistics, designing samples and experiments, probability and random variables, and inference with confidence intervals and significance tests. The Investigative Task takes something familiar and pushes it somewhere you have not seen, then asks you to reason your way through. It rewards clear thinking more than memorized procedure.

How the rubric scores points

Statistics is graded holistically. Each question earns a single score from 4 for a complete response down to 0, based on how well your statistics, your communication, and your context fit together. On an inference question, readers look for three moves: name the procedure and check its conditions, carry out the mechanics, and state a conclusion in context that is linked back to the interval or the p-value. Miss any one of those and a 4 quietly becomes a 3 or a 2.

Where students lose points

How to practice

Work the College Board released AP Statistics free-response questions with the official scoring guidelines next to you, and practice writing full conclusions in context until the structure is automatic. Save a few recent Investigative Tasks for full-length, timed reps. When you want to see where a raw score lands, the AP Statistics score calculator will project it onto the 1–5 scale.