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Advanced Placement tests go digital

Advanced Placement tests go digital

AP Testing will look different for students this year since beginning in May 2025, 28 AP exams will move to Bluebook, a digital format used by the College Board.

Of these 28 tests, 16 will be fully digital, while 12 will be hybrid where students access the questions online but submit their free-response answers on paper.

Fully digital exams will be mainly for humanities-focused subjects such as English and History, while the hybrid exams are mainly for STEM subjects such as Chemistry and Biology.

One popular AP exam, AP English Language and Composition, will be among those making the transition to fully online. AP Lang teacher Keith Tocci said the College Board first introduced digital exam in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The exam was digital in 2020 and again in 2021 because of COVID-19,” Tocci said.

During the pandemic, all AP exams were digital and 45 minutes long. This change received backlash, though, as students had a multitude of technical difficulties before and during the tests.

Now, the digital exams range from 2-3 hours long. However, this recent shift towards digital exams was not influenced by the legacy of the pandemic, according to an announcement from Trevor Packer, the head of the AP program. Packer said the primary reason for the transition was the vulnerability of paper exams to theft and cheating.

As the College Board currently mails schools thousands of tests in advance, the widespread distribution of paper tests is prone to theft and leaking of answers. Digital exams are supposed to make questions more secure while also making test-taking more streamlined, accessible, and student-friendly.

Beginning in March, the SAT became fully digital for similar reasons.

Tocci said there are both upsides and downsides to this shift for writing-intensive AP exams.

“There are benefits to sitting and writing an essay by hand. It focuses you and requires you to put ideas together in a linear fashion,” Tocci said. “If you can type more efficiently and put your ideas together with more flexibility, I think there are going to be lots of benefits for students.”

Junior Brian Liu agrees and said he is looking forward to the change.

“I think digitizing the AP Lang test will make writing much easier because typing is a lot faster than writing with a pencil,” Liu said.

Liu does have some concerns about being able to engage with some of the exams, though.

“For hybrid exams, I think that switching between digital and physical formats might be confusing for some students, especially when they’re under pressure,” Liu said. “Reading questions on a screen and writing responses on paper might slow down peoples’ workflow.”

With new content released online, Tocci said he will incorporate more lessons from the resources provided by the College Board for his class next year.

However, this transition has also raised some skepticism about equity and access. For example, despite transitioning to digital and eliminating the need for paper materials and shipping, the AP exams still cost around $99.

AP U.S. History teacher Katya Villalobos said another problem could be the accessibility challenges that arise as a result of relying on computers for the exams.

“We obviously are fortunate. Many students have their own computers, so Paly and Gunn will be fine with the (transition),” Villalobos said. “But I know that there are some concerns from some of my colleagues about the equity issue, about the schools, because not all schools have access to those resources.”

The College Board agreed to an interview request for this story but had not responded to the questions submitted to them by press time. The online version of this story will be updated with their response if it is received.

A full list of the digital AP Exam subjects can be found on the College Board website.

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