It would appear that the AP Chinese test is intended to be comparable to the end of the second-year (fourth semester) college Chinese language course:
https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/...f?course=ap-chinese-language-and-culture

Which makes mores sense with the report that reading a newspaper is part of it. Most first semester college Chinese courses wouldn't cover the thousands of characters necessary to read a newspaper with any level of proficiency.

So presumably, scoring a 5 ought to get one out of the entire world language requirement in university.

...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...