AP Around the World

Many schools across the world offer AP Exams. If your school doesn’t administer AP Exams, please review the steps to find an alternate school for testing. 

If you’re unable to locate an alternate school for testing, you might consider expanding your search area.  

Alternatively, you can consider testing at an authorized AP test center, available in the countries below:

• China, mainland: please visit AP in China
• China, Hong Kong
• India: please visit AP in India for locations
• Singapore (two administrators: Prometric and USEIC)
• South Korea
• Turkey (new)
• United Kingdom (new)
• Vietnam (new cities added)

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Yes. We recommend taking the AP course before taking an AP Exam—but it’s not required. We want to be sure homeschooled students and students in schools that don’t offer AP can take AP Exams.

You will have to arrange to take the exam at your school or, if your school doesn’t administer the exam, at a local school or testing center that administers it. See The AP Exam I want to take isn’t offered at my school. What should I do? and I’m homeschooled. How can I take an AP Exam? for details.

To prepare for the exam without taking the course, you should study the skills and content outlined in the course and exam description for your subject, which you can find on the specific course page. For most courses, this document also explains how your knowledge of the course content and skills is assessed on the exams.

Get to know the exams by reviewing free practice questions. The AP Program releases free-response questions every year for exams that have them. We also offer free-response questions from past exams along with sample student responses and scoring guidelines so you can see why a real exam taker got the score they did.

Note: AP Seminar and AP Research students who are homeschooled or taking the class through an online provider must be enrolled in both an exam only section and a teacher-led class section so:  

• They can access resources assigned by the teacher.  
• The teacher can submit these students’ presentation scores in the AP Digital Portfolio.

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Yes. You can’t order AP Exams directly, but you should be able to arrange to take exams at a nearby high school that administers AP Exams. Here’s how. 

Your first step is to search the AP Course Ledger. The AP Course Ledger is the official, up-to-date, comprehensive list of schools that have passed the AP Course Audit. You can search by country, state/province, or city to find a school where you might be able to test. After finding schools near you that offer the courses you want to take exams for, do an internet search for the school’s phone number. Then call and ask to speak with the school’s AP coordinator to learn if the school is allowing students from other schools to test there this year. 

Look for and contact schools as early in the school year as possible. Note that schools may have their own local deadlines and policies for receiving requests from outside students to test at their school, so you’ll want to give yourself as much time as possible to contact schools. Updates will be made to the AP Course Ledger every November, so if you still need to find possible schools, you can check the Ledger again in November to see if any schools in your area were added. The exam ordering deadline for schools is November 15. 

When you find an AP coordinator able to administer your AP Exam(s), they are responsible for ordering your exam materials, telling you when and where to report for the exams, and collecting the exam fees. 

Note: If you’re unable to find a school by November 15, you can keep looking. At their discretion, a school could add you to their order after November 15, and they could request that the late order fee be waived in that circumstance. But because schools can set their own deadlines and policies related to ordering and fees, start looking for a school as early as possible. 

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