Inside Higher Ed
Put down your pencils: The Advanced Placement test will take place entirely online.
Starting this May, the College Board will discontinue paper exams for 28 of the 36 AP subjects that offer end-of-year exams, reflecting a growing transition to digital testing.
All the AP exams will be offered via Bluebook, a digital testing application that also hosts the SAT and PSAT.
Students will take the exam completely online or with a mix of online and handwritten responses, depending on the subject matter. Essay-based exams, like AP U.S. History and AP English Language and Composition, will be fully online, while computational tests, like AP Biology and AP Statistics, will be a mix of multiple-choice online and free response on paper. The remaining paper exams are language and music exams, which require audio files.
College Board has offered digital AP exams for select subjects since 2022, after first providing at-home online test taking for students in 2020, when the pandemic caused challenges in administering and collecting students’ tests.
The transition to digital testing hasn’t been smooth for the College Board; thousands of students experienced difficulties completing the English and Chinese tests in 2023.
Cheating has also hurried College Board’s digitization plans, as the organization seeks to improve security after a higher-than-normal share of student scores had to be canceled in 2024 due to alleged academic misconduct.
Changes to the AP exam have raised doubts about the rigor of the tests and scoring methodology. College Board acknowledged an overhaul of its AP scoring system in 2024, which it claims creates a more data-informed approach to scoring, though critics argue it is boosting student scores.
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Ashley Mowreader
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