In July of 2024, College Board announced that starting in May of 2025, 28 AP exams would be taken fully or partially digitally. This decision followed the recent transition of the SATs to digital testing as well.
The reason for this change, according to a post on the College Board website, was that the company has seen a rise in people “compromising AP Exam content for financial gain,” and that they “believe that paper AP testing will continue to be vulnerable to theft and cheating.” Presumably, in addition to preventing cheating, digital tests are easier for College Board to administer, because they don’t have to deal with lost tests and unreadable handwriting. They can also be better standardized across different schools.
This movement towards digital exams definitely benefits College Board, but does it benefit students?
By reducing administrative work for College Board, the digital tests put a lot of that burden on us and our schools. Students now have to bring their own computer to tests and remember to charge them. This shouldn’t be too difficult, but in a room of 50 teenagers, there’s always going to be someone who forgot to charge their device. Our schools now have to provide Wi-Fi that can support all of these devices taking a test at once, and our administrators have to deal with a plethora of technical difficulties before an exam can start.
For example, at the April SAT, a handful of students couldn’t log in to Bluebook (the app used to take the digital tests), and the exam was delayed. When interviewed, junior Sofia Kelly recounted her experience: “The April SAT was a nightmare for me, because I was on my personal computer and the Wi-Fi kept flickering while I was signing in. I ended up taking it on a school Chromebook, but we had to start 45 minutes late.” Everyone signed in eventually, but while we waited for these issues to be solved, people doubted that the test would start at all, and speculated that we might just have to go home.
The AP exams were working much better until the very last one. On May 16, many students encountered issues logging into Bluebook to take the AP Psychology exam. “This happened across the whole country, not just at Haldane,” commented junior Emmett Horner. College Board extended the start time for the exam, but the problem continued. “Now we have to retake it the week after,” said Horner.
These technical difficulties combine to create an incredibly hectic environment right before exams. Imagine being a nervous teenager waiting to take a test that may determine where you go to college–so basically, the most important thing in the world. Now imagine being surrounded by your classmates panickedly trying to find Chromebook chargers, administrators anxiously connecting students to Wi-Fi, and people whispering, “I bet we’ll just have to go home.” It doesn’t help, does it? Before starting the traditional paper tests, the routine of placing stickers, filling out a Scantron sheet, and quietly listening to instructions served to create a calm, focused mood in the room. But the chaos that the digital tests cause does not allow students to focus, and it’s hard to mentally prepare yourself to take a test if you don’t know when or if you’ll take it. Surely some of these issues will be fixed with time, but College Board shouldn’t have released the exams before ensuring that they would work as intended.
Besides the technical difficulties, the actual nature of taking a test online is more complicated. There are definitely some benefits, and that’s up to personal preference. For the multiple choice, it is nice that we don’t have to bubble in answers on a Scantron sheet; it helps save time and reduces copy errors made by students. But on the other hand, it can be difficult to use certain strategies digitally. Bluebook offers features that allow students to mark an answer for review, annotate, and eliminate answers, but they can be inconvenient to use. “I like to underline things and write quick notes, which I can’t do now… [in Bluebook] you can annotate, but it takes longer and I don’t think a lot of people actually do it,” said junior Amelia Kaye. Annotating on paper is more intuitive, and there are other strategies that can’t be used on digital tests at all, like drawing on top of diagrams.
Many people do prefer typing essays, and for good reason: it can be faster, editing is easier, and you get fewer hand cramps. “I like typing an essay better because it’s easier to change what I write, and it’s faster,” commented junior Eleanor Chew. It is nice to edit easily, especially for English APs, for which the goal is to write well. However, not being able to edit can actually be an advantage in some cases. Writing on paper can help you meet a time limit because you have to quickly accept what you’ve written and move on, instead of continuously editing. “When it’s on paper, you become less worried about the writing, and it’s easier to get your thoughts out,” commented Kelly. “You can’t overthink it.” This can be helpful when it’s more important to write fast than to write well, like on a history AP, where it doesn’t really matter whether your essay sounds good as long as you follow the rubric. Because of this, I think that ideally, everything but the English essays should be on paper.
But perhaps the biggest issue I have with the digital tests is with a new feature specific to math questions: Desmos. Bluebook now gives us access to Desmos, a really powerful and easy-to-use online graphing calculator, during the SAT math modules and the math and science APs. Don’t get me wrong, I love Desmos! I love Desmos just as much as the rest of my period 4 Intro to Calc class. It’s great when math teacher Christian Hoolan uses it to show us how a function looks. It’s a valuable tool that helps students understand math conceptually. And it’s great that Desmos gives everyone access to the same calculator during tests. But it shouldn’t be on the SAT.
On paper tests, students bring a physical graphing calculator. These are hard to use and clunky, so it was usually faster to solve everything by hand, and just use the calculator for arithmetic and checking. But Desmos is so simple and efficient that for SAT math, it’s now always faster to plug something into Desmos than to solve it algebraically. I’m not talking about using it to find 15 + 27. I’m talking about reading, “how many solutions are there to f(x) = x² + 2x + 1?” and immediately graphing the function in Desmos and seeing it has one x-intercept. I’m talking about getting the whole answer for every question without ever touching a pencil or doing a calculation. This is the fastest way to take the test, and it feels like the time limit was set assuming that every student would be doing this. “I used Desmos on every single question,” said Chew. “It helped me finish more of the test.” Kelly commented, “I was reliant on Desmos for everything; I went straight to it to get the answer.”
Unpopular opinion, but I like doing the algebra. I like solving puzzles. I think that’s the whole point of math in the first place—thinking through a problem and coming up with a creative solution. But while I was taking the SAT in April, I wasn’t doing any of that. I was plugging stuff into Desmos, reading the graph, and picking an answer. I had no choice—I’ve never been able to finish the second math module in time without using this strategy for every question. But is this the point of the SAT? Should we really be admitted into college based on how well we can use a calculator?
The choice to transition to digital SATs and AP exams in this manner should be carefully reconsidered. It’s created an emphasis on brainless math, and it’s unfair that students have to suffer the consequences of College Board’s tech problems. We shouldn’t necessarily return to entirely paper tests—there are a lot of benefits to digital ones. But the digital tests in their current state are not serving students as well as they need to be.