The majority of AP exams that will be conducted this May at the high school will either be fully online or hybrid, except for some language exams, Vice Principal and AP coordinator Jennifer Hutchison said.
Hutchison believes that there are a multitude of reasons why College Board is choosing to switch to online exam formats, chief among them security and convenience, she said.
“The paper process is quite lengthy and detailed and lends itself to missing AP exams, errors on AP exams, and so on,” Hutchison said. “By having a digital capture, it’s all right there and easily scanned for them. The shipping of everything is very minimal with these changes.”
College Board and all the AP teachers have been aware of the change and are planning for a transition for essentially all AP exams to move either fully online or, at the very least, hybrid, science teacher and frequent AP proctor Letta Meyer said.
The original time frame for the transition “was a couple of years, and things were coming in one exam at a time, or a couple of exams at a time,” Meyer said. “It just got accelerated.”
Although the transition to online for most exams will feel intuitive and natural, other science and math exams will remain hybrid so students don’t have to show their work for Free Response Questions (FRQ) online, Meyer said.
“If we could have a stylus where we were writing on an iPad or what you guys (students) do with your Chromebooks for everybody it’d be fine, but just the amount of time it takes to type because of all of the crazy notations that we’ve got, that’s really where the challenge is,” Meyer said. “So all of those exams are still hybrid, especially doing a graph or graphing type things.”
A major gripe that many science and math teachers have with the new exam format is the lack of a physical reference sheet, which is instead built into the testing platform, Meyer said. The issue arises for students who will then be forced to constantly click between the reference sheet and the actual exam, she added. Although it can’t be changed this year, Meyer hopes to see changes in future years, she said.
“This year, that’s where it is,” Meyer said. “But afterward, you guys will get surveys. You guys have to respond and tell them you want those reference sheets off the computer screen. They’re released. There is nothing secret about them. They can print them as part of the packet.”
AP Psychology teacher Lauren Byler-Garcia believes that the College Board is lagging in terms of the resources they have available for students to prepare for the new exam format, she said.
“There’s not a lot of other software out there to practice with other than AP classroom, and there’s limited, limited access to versions of test questions,” Byler said. “I think test security is a bigger issue in terms of that.”
Although Byler-Garcia admits her students may not have the most optimal preparation, she still chooses to have her multiple-choice question tests on paper for the majority of the year, Byler said.
“I still don’t fully trust testing software when it comes to cheating and for multiple-choice tests that might be disadvantageous to my kids, because they’re going to have to get used to being able to stare at a screen for hours at a time,” Byler said. “But I think if we do practice tests leading up to it (the AP exam), they will be fine.”
The school is constantly trying to improve the AP testing process every year, which is constantly evolving, Meyer said. The introduction of stickers at the beginning of the AP exam was a new addition made for all exams last year, Meyer added.
“So you guys notice you get stickers now that have a seat number on as part of your check-in process,” Meyer said. “That sticker has saved us so much time because you’re not having to go look, find your name, and find where your seat number is. And then in two steps, you forget what your seat number was, and now you have to go back and disrupt the line again.”
Hutchison advises students to remember that the AP exam is just another test and that they should remain calm, she said. Hutchison asks students to view the exam simply as an opportunity to show what they have been working on and learning all year, and not to worry about the new exam format, she added.
“Just go in doing your very best with the new digital hybrid part, recognizing it’s just a new way,” Hutchison said. “It’s a new method, embrace the convenience of some of it, and then, if there are struggles, ask for help because that’s what we’re (AP proctors) here for. And make sure your Chromebook is charged.”