“I love paper,” Samishka Chitnis, a Berkeley High School sophomore currently enrolled in AP Chemistry, explained, “I love scribbling. I love annotating the questions. I love just having a free space knowing that it's right on the question.” But when Chitnis takes the Advanced Placement Chemistry test in May, she won’t be taking it on paper.
Over the past years, tests have been moving from paper to online. Twice a year at BHS, students take MAP growth assessments on Chromebooks. The ACT now offers both paper and digital test forms. The SAT went fully online in 2024. This year, 28 AP exams are adopting digital test-taking forms. Matt Albinson, the BHS AP Coordinator, explained, “[The College Board has] been pushing this way for a number of years and a lot of other exams have been digital for a long time. So the AP is kind of honestly on the slow side.”
Many AP exams, such as the Chemistry, Biology, Calculus, Drawing, Music Theory, and Statistics exams will be a hybrid of paper and screen. Students will complete the multiple-choice sections of the exams online and read the free response sections off a computer screen while writing the answers in a booklet. Other AP exams, such as English Language and Composition, Art History, and United States History, are fully digital. Although the digital AP tests are less expensive and easier for the administrators, they can be detrimental to the testing experience of students.
“I think one thing that happened last year is that there was a lot of cheating … It was just getting harder and harder because before this they had to mail the exams and the exams would sit at the school for a month. So it’s just hard to keep it tight,” Albinson expressed. The College Board, which administers the AP exams, announced the switch “to ensure the continued security of AP exams” – in other words, to decrease the risk of cheating.
While it may be more difficult to cheat on a digital exam, it is certainly not impossible. Chitnis does not believe that the online tests are the solution to this problem. “If you’re thinking people are gonna cheat by hiding equations in their pocket, that’s still gonna happen … Or if they’re trying to stop people sharing answers, they can still do that by having a piece of paper that they write the answer on … People who want to cheat will always find a way to cheat. And I think you’re not eliminating any of the cheating by making it online,” Chitnis said.
Proponents of the digital AP test also argue that the exam is more accessible since students are familiar with the exam's technology and can use either their own or a school device. However, since the style of test-taking online is very different from paper, this can create an achievement gap between students who have reliable access to good internet and a personal device to practice on and those who do not. Fatemeh Mizbani, an AP Chemistry teacher at BHS, believes this achievement gap can only be remedied by schools and the government. “If states, schools, or the federal government want to go (this digital testing) route they also have to put money into resources and make sure that everyone has equal access,” Mizbani said.
A Harvard Graduate School of Education online article reports a study by James Cowan and Ben Backes, which shows that students who took a digital test “performed as if they’d had five fewer months of academic preparation in math and 11 fewer months of preparation in English than their peers who took the test on paper.” Those effects are not felt uniformly. According to a review of data from 2000-2017 in Education & Finance Direct, the test scores of low-income students, or students from schools that could not regularly provide the relevant technology, were disproportionately harmed.
“It’s all about efficiency,” Mizbani remarked. In their announcement of the digital transition, the College Board highlighted just that – the efficiency of the new exam process. “No more lengthy bubbling and labeling of paper materials before testing can start” notes the announcement. However, Chitnis does not find the digital exam process to be less tedious. “It's very hard to skip back and forth on the online test … I feel like I waste time having to look back and forth between the papers (and the screen),” Chitnis said.
The announcement also stated that the test was now more “streamlined.” For example, exams are submitted automatically as soon as a student’s time runs out. The Bluebook testing application used on AP tests also has a running timer on the student’s screen. Although she has never experienced this timer before, Chitnis expects that it will add stress to her experience. “I would definitely feel a sense of pressure if every single time I had to look at a problem … I had this big countdown in the corner that was just staring me down every single time,” Chitnis said.
The digital AP tests may save the administrators money. It will take less time and effort to grade the multiple-choice sections and they will no longer have to print and ship thousands of AP tests back and forth between schools. But the price of the AP tests for students has not dropped, and those savings for the College Board arrive at the costs of additional burdens to students.
For example, modern technology may not be reliable enough for this form of test-taking. Albinson recalls, “Two years ago, there were about 10 kids whose U.S. history exams didn’t go through. They were given the option to test again in the fall.”
If the AP test is pushed back to the next academic school year, students would have to prepare with less teacher guidance. They might not only forget the material but also have to spend their summer studying for a test they already took.
Chitnis finds it difficult to transfer her paper test-taking strategies to the online test. “I like to annotate … the problem itself. But it's kind of hard to do that when it's a plain, empty box without the question in it … If I'm doing multiple choice and I'm like, ‘oh, this question is hard I’ll put a star next to it.’ Or I'll put a squiggle and be like, ‘I'm not sure about this answer’ … So I feel like I'm definitely more in control of taking the test when it's on paper, just because I have the ability to do those kinds of things,” Chitnis said.
The annotating tools offered by the computer programs are imperfect substitutes. Chitnis says, “There's a flagging system, but even then, it's very annoying … it'll show up as, like, a number and it's flagged. That doesn't tell me much. I need my own annotation system.”
The digital AP test cannot be implemented in schools until it is ensured that it does not create a new equity gap, that technological glitches do not force students to spend their summers studying, and that students who have developed test-taking strategies based on paper exams do not suffer from the new format. The paper AP test was never broken, and we do not need a digital one to fix it.