During the COVID pandemic, the College Board had to administer AP exams digitally, as they couldn’t risk the spread of the virus among people at schools and proctoring centers.
The College Board now offers students both paper and digital testing for certain subjects. For the 2024 school year, College Board offers digital tests for Computer Science Principles, English Language, English Literature, European History, Seminar, U.S. History and World History.
The format, timing and structure of the digital exams are identical to the traditional paper exams. The key difference between digital and paper exams is that the student can type using a keyboard, instead of handwriting with a pen.
AP English Literature Teacher Robyn Samuelson described the tradeoffs presented with typing and handwriting on the FRQ section for her class. “Handwriting slows things down in a good way,” Samuelson expressed. “Typing on paper allows people to dive right in and doesn’t make them need to think.”
Writing is a slower process because it takes time to cross out and redo sentences. On AP tests, students must think about what they want to say before they write due to limited time.
On the other hand, typing can help tackle the FRQ immediately after reading the prompt because the student can easily edit their writing using copy-paste and delete commands with their keyboard.
Although Samuelson believes handwriting is more beneficial, she lets her students choose the way they want to write their essays.
Samuelson also described a possibility of going back to traditional methods, “The only way I see us going back to handwritten is if AI becomes very difficult to detect and it becomes too much of an issue with students.”
AP US History teacher Erin Klage agrees with Samuelson. “A negative aspect with digital is making sure everything is secure and done the right way.”
Klage tells her students to take the AP exam on traditional paper due to an incident that happened at last year’s AP US History exam. During the time of the exam, the WiFi went out, causing the exam to be postponed.
Due to this incident, Klage is not optimistic about digital exams anymore. “The bandwidth of people doing the exam on the actual day is important,” Klage stated.
Regardless, more than 3,600 schools administered 320,000 digital AP Exams in May 2023. This showcased the amount of interest students are showing in these digital formats. Last year, in Samuelson’s AP English Literature class, only two students chose to take the paper version of the test.
Senior Shivesh Ganesh explained the reasoning behind why he is more geared towards the digital option. “Time!” Ganesh exclaimed. “More time allows students to revise easily and submit a well-drafted essay.”
Despite educators’ worries around security and cheating, the use of digital AP tests seems to be prevailing over standard tests. With world advancing through technology, College Board is also adapting to the environment around it.
