AP Statistics Flashcards: What Changed for the May 2027 Exam (and Which Cards to Fix)

If you're sitting the AP Statistics exam in May 2027, read this first. The 101-card deck AP Statistics (RH7668) is accurate about the exam it describes. The trouble is that the exam changed. The College Board's revised course launched in the 2026-27 school year, and about a third of the deck covers the old format. Here's how to keep the useful cards and fix the outdated ones.

What the deck gets right

The concept cards (44-56, 72-88) are the core: descriptive vs inferential statistics, histograms, measures of center, dispersion, outliers, random variables, probability distributions, sampling distributions, statistical inference, the chi-squared test, the normal and t distributions, simulation, categorical vs quantitative data, inference for proportions and means, and least-squares regression.

Retag these cards as "pre-2027 format"

The deck comes from the Wikipedia page on the course, so it describes the exam as it stood through May 2026:

• Nine units with weightings (cards 21-30): the new framework has five. Units 1-2 cover data, study design and probability. Units 3-4 cover inference for proportions and means. Unit 5 covers regression.
• Four skills (cards 16-20, 73-75): these are replaced by four statistical practices taken from the GAISE guidelines. They are Formulate Questions, Collect Data, Analyze Data and Interpret Results.
• 40 multiple-choice questions with five choices (card 7): it's now 42 questions with four choices.
• Six free-response questions plus a 25-minute investigative task (cards 8, 31-32, 84-85): it's now four free-response questions, each worth more points.
• Algebra II prerequisite (cards 5, 96): removed. First-year algebra is enough now.
• Content cut: geometric distributions, chi-square goodness-of-fit, inference for slope, outliers and influential points in regression, and departures from linearity. Card 30 (inference for slopes, 2-5%) now covers a topic that isn't on the exam.

What's missing: you can't calculate anything yet

About 45 of the 101 cards are exam trivia: the 1997 debut with 7,667 students, the committee size, ETS, 266,791 test-takers in 2025, the 2.96 mean score in 2024. None of them asks you to compute a z-score, read a p-value or interpret a confidence interval, which is what the exam actually grades. Before card 44, write these cards yourself:

1. z = (x − mean) / SD, plus one worked value
2. What a 95% confidence interval does and does not mean
3. Type I vs Type II error, with one courtroom analogy each
4. The conditions for inference: random, 10% condition, Large Counts
5. p-value: "the probability of data this extreme if H₀ is true"
6. Interpreting slope and r² in context

Study tips specific to this deck

• Suspend the history block. Cards 1-4, 13-14, 37-40, 60-70 and 89-100 are fun facts that won't earn points. Two of them even disagree: card 93 says the highest share of 5s was 17.5% in 2024, while card 67 gives 17.0% for 2025. Keep them for trivia nights.
• Practice every inference card out loud in context. Free-response answers are graded on communication (card 36), so a card isn't learned until you can write "We are 95% confident that the true proportion of…".

The same exam-versus-content gap shows up in our AP Physics 1 flashcards guide and the AP Biology study guide.

Find AP Statistics (RH7668) in the Flip It library and start with the concept cards.