This year, the College Board has announced that the majority of AP exams are going to be digital for the first time. Students taking their first AP exams this year won’t be affected as much, but what about those students who will have experienced both?
28 AP exams are going digital. While 16 will be fully digital, the other 12 will be hybrid. The AP exams can be taken on any school-issued and controlled device. The platform Bluebook will both time you and allow you to submit the entire exam. Desmos, another platform that is being used, will have digital graphing calculators (with the exception of AP Statistics) available for the rest of the math-based exams.
Many students think that AP Exams going digital will be extremely beneficial. Students will be able to highlight and annotate text in the exam, flag questions to go back to, and use tools like answer elimination to eliminate answers on the multiple-choice questions.
“I think that it is a good shift because it makes it more accessible to people who might not have access to the paper exams, like overseas. I also think that it makes grading a lot easier and more standardized because of all the factors that come with paper, like handwriting and the pen.” Derek, a senior, says. “I think that I would like the digital exam more because it is easier and more compact to work with.”
Other students feel differently about going digital because of any computer errors that may occur.
“I feel like with every school there are going to be some technical difficulties and it will be really annoying to deal with everything like if your Chromebook dies, if the internet is bad, or if the server crashes, it will be really inconvenient.” says senior Shreya.
Some students think that having them digital is only beneficial to some of the exams.
“For AP Lang and Lit it should be digital because writing essays on paper is a form of torture, but for classes like AP Economics, I would like it on paper because making the graphs is much easier than the computer,” says senior Meghna.
Many teachers have mixed feelings about this as well. An AP Psychology teacher has said that the internet and Chromebook malfunctioning can be a huge problem, and affect many outcomes of scores. Students would be more likely to cheat on a digital exam as they say it would be easier.
An AP World History teacher had said that students who have already taken the paper exam would struggle the most to adjust to the digital version. They also had said that cheating would be the same, and not much of an issue for digital exams and believes that the scores would not be as affected by the test being digital.