Digital APs from an AP Student's Perspective
College Board’s recent transition to the digital implementation model is understandable - given the prevalence of digital revolution in schools, from replacing traditional textbooks with tablets to integrating AI and machine learning in classrooms - yet unrealistically ambitious. The company has made a profitable decision. Rather than printing and shipping millions of sheets of paper domestically and internationally every couple months, digitizing tests will not only reduce cost but also labor; grading tests have become more timely efficient and convenient as softwares have replaced human administrators who used to have to manually scan each and every answer sheet. From a business perspective, going digital is no brainer. It saves time and money.
While digital testing is contributing to College Board’s financial growth, it is becoming a burden for its customers, test-taking students. The drawbacks of digital exams not only outweigh the benefits that the private company is enjoying, but also create more inequalities and gaps among students’ educational experiences and achievements. The biggest challenge that students are confronted with is the lack of resources for test preparation. Students rely entirely on paper tests during their preparation for AP exams. On the day of the exam, after months of preparation, students are often thrown off because they have to instantly transition from a pencil-and-paper structure to a computer-based format. This challenge - although it is an anticipated factor - often puts students in unfamiliar and disadvantageous situations, impacting their performance. College Board may have been ready for this revolutionary transition, but schools clearly are not. And it will take a while for schools to fully equip themselves with resources and systems to prepare and enhance students’ digital testing experience.
College Board’s abrupt transition to digital model has also put many students at a disadvantage as the new model has adopted a different style and format. For decades, students have prepared for AP exams by reviewing exams from previous years. When College Board implemented its new digital system, the exams from the past that students have long relied on became outdated and inefficient. Providing students with materials that are no longer relevant is, unquestionably, unfair and unrealistic. Again and again, schools were not ready to transition to College Board’s adoption of technology and business expansion plans.
Another caveat of the company’s independent adoption of technology without taking the schools’ limited resources into consideration is the technology itself. College Board hasn’t properly and fully developed its software to make the test-taking experience functional for everyone. Ranging from formula sheets not opening or crashing the test-taking device to log-in issues with little tech support, various technology hiccups have impacted students’ performance on test days. Entire schools had to cancel their exams either because students had log-in issues that could not be resolved or computers crashed and the software did not respond. Hundreds of students were reassigned to take the “late testing” version of the exam at a later date, complicating their academic plans and performance levels. Students have become, regrettably, the victims of the company’s financial avarice and the schools’ bureaucratic incompetence of providing students with the resources they need.
