Become an Advanced Placement (AP) Reader

Educational Testing Service is hiring Advanced Placement readers again, and the offer has barely changed in years: a few weeks in June, $30 an hour, and a front-row view of how millions of students answer the questions you assign. The current posting closes December 27, 2026, and it's aimed at a specific workforce — AP teachers, college faculty, adjuncts, and graduate teaching assistants.

The role matters more than the seasonal job title suggests, because every AP score that lands on a college transcript starts with a human reader applying a rubric. AP is the Advanced Placement Program, the College Board's suite of college-level courses taken in high school. Students sat for more than six million exams in May 2025 across 40 subjects, and the Reading that followed was the largest in the program's history. The current ETS posting puts last June's count at more than 34,000 readers. ETS, the Educational Testing Service based in Princeton, New Jersey, runs the scoring operation on the College Board's behalf.

What the job actually involves

Readers don't grade the whole exam. The multiple-choice section is scored by computer; a reader's work is the free-response section — the essays, problems, artworks, and other open-ended responses a machine can't reliably judge. In 2025, that meant more than 20 million student responses passing through the Reading, according to the College Board. The free-response scores combine with the multiple-choice total into a composite that becomes the familiar 1-to-5 AP score.

Before anyone scores a live response, every reader completes the same training: a walk through the exam task and scoring guidelines, then practice sets with annotated feedback. The final step is a calibration set of pre-scored responses that tests whether a reader is applying the rubric the same way as everyone else. That consistency is the entire product. A score of 3 has to mean roughly the same thing in Oregon as it does in Georgia, which is why the job rewards disciplined application of the rubric more than individual editorial judgment.

Readers are mentored throughout by scoring leaders who review practice and calibration results. The work is repetitive by design, and the people who return year after year tend to describe it as the most useful professional feedback they get on how students actually think.

Who is eligible

High school applicants must be teaching an AP course that has current authorization. Any course a school labels “AP” has to pass a review called the AP Course Audit, so the authorization letter is the document that proves the course is real. The College Board's official eligibility page spells out both tracks.

College-side applicants must be active faculty members — full-time or adjunct — or graduate teaching assistants who have taught at least one semester of a comparable college course within the past three years. Retired teachers and AP coordinators don't qualify, and only candidates legally authorized to work in the United States will be considered.

The current posting has no degree requirement, which is worth saying plainly: the qualifying credential is teaching the material, not holding a particular diploma. Some subjects add their own filters. Computer Science Principles applicants must name their programming languages. Seminar and Research readers need documented experience with seminar-style or research-methods teaching. Precalculus readers on the college side must teach precalculus, trigonometry, calculus, or a course that lists one of those as a prerequisite.

The pay, in plain terms

The rate is $30 an hour for training and scoring alike, and overtime applies beyond 40 hours in the scoring week. Onsite readers get travel reimbursed and have lodging and meals covered. At-home readers earn the same hourly rate without the travel benefit. Readers are W-2 employees of the staffing platform, so earnings carry the usual federal, state, and payroll withholding — worth remembering when you budget the week.

A full 40-hour week therefore comes to about $1,200 before taxes. That is modest for a second job, and it's better understood as subsidized professional development than as a second income, especially for adjuncts who are already paid by the course. Readers also earn continuing education units, known as CEUs: one for every 10 hours worked, up to 16, with a personalized certificate issued in July. State licensing boards and school districts often accept those hours toward licensure or professional development requirements, which is where much of the real value sits.

Two ways to score

The in-person route commits readers to seven consecutive days at a Reading site. The 2025 Reading ran in Kansas City, Missouri; Salt Lake City, Utah; Tampa, Florida; and Cleveland, Ohio, which hosted for the first time. The College Board described that event as the largest in the program's history.

The at-home route offers flexible schedules inside the same seven-day window, but readers must attend mandatory training at scheduled times regardless of time zone. It requires a desktop or laptop PC — tablets are not supported — and a stable connection for the scoring software, as the program's at-home guide details.

Subject schedules for the June 2027 Reading are already emerging, with economics readers, for example, slated for June 2–8, 2027, in Kansas City or remotely. The date matters if you're weighing the commitment now: the question is not whether you can score, but whether a specific week of June is genuinely yours.

How to apply, and what the fine print says

Applications go through Raise, the staffing platform that handles onboarding, identity verification, payroll, and employment paperwork for readers. The apply link on the current ETS posting is available through apptrkr.com/9918145, and the full listing is posted on AcademicJobs.com.

The application is multi-step. You'll need a resume or CV — if yours needs work, this guide to writing an academic CV is a useful place to start — plus a syllabus, or for high school teachers, a College Board course authorization letter. Review can take up to four weeks, and an approval letter simply adds you to the reader pool.

That pool is not the same thing as a schedule. Invitations go out in waves: a location survey in November, first-round invitations in January, second-round invitations in February, and additional rounds as needed through May. Invitations are not guaranteed, and in subjects with deep reader pools, a qualified applicant can wait years. The subjects marked as high-need in the current listing are where first-year invitations are likeliest.

• Biology
• Business with Personal Finance
• Comparative Government and Politics
• English Language and Composition
• Environmental Science
• European History
• Human Geography
• Research
• Seminar
• United States Government and Politics
• United States History
• World History: Modern

The part the brochure leaves out

Readers report the experience in near-unanimous terms: 98 percent call it positive, and 99 percent of high school teachers and college faculty say it improved their teaching, according to College Board survey figures. Those numbers have held for years, and they're believable. Calibrating on a shared rubric and then seeing thousands of real student responses is a kind of feedback most classrooms never provide.

The invitation system is the quieter gatekeeper. The program rotates slots on purpose, to spread the benefit across more educators, which means the people who most need a paid professional development week — adjuncts with thin schedules, early-career teachers without summer income — are the same people a multi-year wait hits hardest. The $30 rate has not moved even as exam volume has climbed, and the value of the CEUs depends on whether the relevant state or district actually accepts them. The announcement describes a program; the experience depends on where you sit inside the pool.

The question the program's operators will face in year two of record volumes is simpler and harder to answer: how long a $30-an-hour, seven-day scoring week stays attractive to the educators who sustain it, and what happens to the consistency of the rubric if the answer is “not much longer.”