By William Schuster,
Staff Writer.
Due to an increasing wave of cheating during AP (Advanced Placement) testing, 28 AP exams will be taken online country-wide this May. With 16 fully digital and 12 hybrid digital, multiple-choice questions will be completed online and free-response questions will be viewed online and completed in a paper response booklet.
College Board plans to administer the tests through their application Bluebook, which they hope will increase security around exams and diminish the need for wide-spread cancellations of tests due to cheating. The idea is that administering them online will prevent questions from being leaked before tests, making it more difficult to cheat. However, this dramatic change is looking to have serious implications for students and teachers alike.
At its core, the Bluebook application is designed to streamline online testing for AP students and get rid of the need for less secure paper exams. However, Bluebook has its share of problems. “Right before I was about to take the DSAT, Bluebook glitched, froze and broke my school Chromebook,” said senior Mary Blakely Heuer. Bluebook can be unreliable and may cause issues for students using it to take AP exams, resulting in hosts of problems not easily solved.
While this change affects many AP classes and tests, one of the more drastic changes that has been implemented is within AP Language and Composition, whose AP exam used to consist of three hand-written essays alongside a multiple-choice section. Now that the exam is being taken online, the course will have to navigate the transition from practicing hand-writing essays to a typing approach, taking up more class time to teach typing skills and how to manage the online Bluebook application. While College Board is doing their best to smoothen the transition process by providing devices and Wi-Fi access to schools and students in need, the impacts of this shift are yet to be seen.
Ultimately, it’s difficult to tell how impacted students will be by this transition to digital AP exams, and there’s not a lot that can be done besides trying our best to prepare and adapt for this change.
