The Advanced Placement Programme offers college level courses at high schools across the United States and Canada. Advanced Placement (AP) examinations, which are linked to the level of first-year US university courses, are designed to test a student's discipline-specific knowledge, skills, and proficiencies.

The purpose of all AP examinations is to provide universities with information about the level of knowledge and proficiency students bring. Most universities in the US and Canada use AP exams to give students credit for the first-year introductory course in a given discipline, to place students into advanced courses in a given discipline, or both.

The Tariff Expert Group decided, for the purposes of allocating UCAS Tariff Points, to classify the AP programmes into two groups as shown below:

• Group A consists of those subjects which build upon pre-existing knowledge developed in high school and where the level of assessment demand is consequently higher than in the Group B subjects
• Group B subjects are characterized as being more akin to survey courses (A type of course that is offered in the first or second year of a four year degree programme that introduces a learner to a broad range of concepts from either a discipline or a field), introducing learners to new subject content and assessed with a slightly lower level of demand than the Group A subjects.