Free AP Statistics Lesson Plans with Real College Data
Students care about college admissions, so teach statistics with it. Each lesson uses a real CSV of U.S. colleges from the Department of Education (IPEDS and the College Scorecard), with a student worksheet, a teacher key and extensions. Free, no account, print-ready.
The lessons
Each one prints cleanly: the site header and footer are left off, and the teacher key starts on its own page.
Students plot the admit rate of 723 U.S. colleges against their average SAT, describe the association, compute the correlation, fit a least-squares line and interpret residuals for real colleges.
Unit 2: Exploring Two-Variable Data; Extension: Unit 9: Inference for Quantitative Data: Slopes. One 50-minute class period.
The 1,013 colleges in the file are the population. Students draw random samples of 25 colleges, compare sample means of admit rate to the population mean, and build the sampling distributions of a mean and a proportion.
Unit 5: Sampling Distributions; Unit 3: Collecting Data. One to two 50-minute class periods.
Students take a random sample of 40 public and 40 private colleges, compare six-year graduation rates with boxplots, and run a two-sample t test and interval. Then they check the answer against all 1,081 colleges.
Unit 7: Inference for Quantitative Data: Means; Unit 1: Exploring One-Variable Data. Two 50-minute class periods.
Students compare what families in five income brackets actually pay after grants at 1,051 colleges, summarize each distribution, and estimate the mean gap between the highest and lowest bracket with paired differences.
Unit 1: Exploring One-Variable Data; Unit 7: Inference for Quantitative Data: Means. One to two 50-minute class periods.
What you need to know
- Free to use, copy and share with students. No account, no email, nothing to install.
- The data is federal and public: admissions counts from IPEDS and cost, graduation and test-score fields from the College Scorecard, for the 1,100+ four-year colleges CollegeCalcAI tracks. Each lesson says which year each column is from.
- Every number in the teacher keys is computed by code from the same CSV your students download, and random samples use a fixed seed, so your key matches your students' file.
- Unit references use the unit names in the College Board AP Statistics Course and Exam Description. These lessons are not endorsed by the College Board.
Data last rebuilt September 16, 2026. Questions or a lesson you would like to see: support@collegecalcai.com.