Starting in the spring of 2025, College Board—the organization behind Advanced Placement (AP) courses—will implement the switch of AP exams to digital and hybrid (both paper and online components). This nationwide change has sparked debate among the students and teachers of these courses.
In the past, AP exams were done in paper booklets, with separate sections for multiple choice and free responses. Everything for these exams was done on paper, with online elements only for classes that required portfolios, presentations, or spoken free responses.
Now with the switch, tests will be taken fully digital or hybrid. College Board has seen a spike in recent years of AP exams being distributed by non-College Board personnel through illegal means. Paper exams offered an opportunity for people to sell or distribute the exams beyond the College Board’s bounds. This created an advantage for any students who had seen the exam beforehand. In July, Trevor Packer, the head of the College Board’s AP program, acknowledged this concern in an open letter on the College Board website.
“We believe that paper AP testing will continue to be vulnerable to theft and cheating,” Packer said.
Not only did security pose a problem, but the task of accounting for all tests did as well. Paper exams had to be counted individually by hand and shipped to schools throughout the United States, posing as an added risk for lost tests.
“Testing security becomes an issue because of accounting for the hundreds of tests that you have to count and make sure that whatever you receive you send back to College Board,” counselor Jim Hu said.
Different classes’ exams will be formatted uniquely.
The College Board announced that 28 AP courses will be moved online for the 2025 school year exam season, with the remaining 11 courses that don’t fall under those categories having their own ways of testing. Of the 28, 16 will be done fully digitally, and 12 will be done hybrid.
Hybrid and online AP exams will be taken through Bluebook, which is the same program used for SAT and PSAT assessments. Tests will have a timer at the top of the screen to let students know how much time they have during the test. Students may skip ahead and go back to previous questions until time expires. When going through the test, questions can be marked for review or skipped. These marked questions will show up on the bar that switches through all questions, as well as on the review sheet at the end of the sections when all questions are answered. Answers will save automatically, and students may switch through questions without worrying about their incompletion. Students may make digital annotations to the stimulus, as well as edits to the format of their prompt responses. Text from the passages can’t be copied or cut into the answers and spell-check will not be enabled.
With the recent switch, people have begun to consider the advantages and disadvantages that come with it. Senior Quincy Dean, a former AP Language and Composition student, believes it will help students take that exam in the future.
“I think typing it up would be so much easier and definitely beneficial because you can go back and delete stuff and you don’t have to worry about messing up,” Dean said.
Dean believes paper exams are beneficial for annotating the prompts, but overall thinks typing the free response answers would have been easier. Students who struggle with writing by hand may also find advantages in this change. However, the use of technology for exams poses disadvantages to some students.
“When I’m doing things online, I can’t concentrate or focus when it’s on a screen versus when it’s on paper,” senior and former AP Biology student Samara Pineda said.
The struggle to concentrate and eye strain can occur for students during while testing on a computer for prolonged hours. Not only does this play a part in an increased difficulty to focus, but this format creates a more challenging test in general. Studies published in the scientific journal “Nature” found that handwriting stimulates the brain to use motor skills, as well as visual skills, unlike typing. Students create more neural connections while writing by hand, allowing them to retain more and perform better. AP Lang teacher Shannon Ward agrees with this.
“Hard copies and handwriting are part of how students learn and retain knowledge… There is so much research out there that shows that paper tests and handwriting are more conducive to student learning,” Ward said.
To prepare for the upcoming switch, there are resources through teachers and the College Board for students to practice not only for the exam itself, but also to get used to the new format.
