AP Exams Should Not Be Full Length This Year

by Suchi Mehta

We all remember the experience of taking AP exams last year. With the abrupt ending to the in-person school year, AP exams, too, were switched to an all-online format. Instead of the full three-hour exams, each test was reduced to just 45 minutes, and some of the units that were typically taught at the end of the school year were removed from the test as well to accommodate for the difficult circumstances that both students and teachers were going through having to adjust to a new online-learning environment. This system had lots of flaws: students not being able to submit their work and having to retake the test, the shortened test’s limited content coverage, and students in other time zones being forced to take the exams at odd hours were all things that made last year’s AP exams far from ideal. However, our situation this year could potentially be just as bad.

This year, the College Board has decided to make exams full-length and covering the full curriculum again, despite the clear disadvantage that AP students have this year. In our school, we have classes that are far shorter than what they used to be, a mere 53 minutes in a block as opposed to the full 78 minutes that we are used to. In a normal year, learning an entire AP curriculum is always a race to the finish line, especially since a lot of schools in the US start in August and thus get an entire month extra to learn the same material that we do. This year, with extremely shortened classes, covering all the material is practically impossible by May without cutting corners and/or rushing through the material so fast that we cannot master it properly. In addition, with so many kids learning from home, teachers are much less accessible for extra help and the collaborative growth and understanding that comes from working and speaking with other students is gone. When a student is taking multiple AP exams in the same year, the situation gets even worse, and frankly, unmanageable. Arguably, the situation this year is far worse than what it was at the end of last year, and yet the College Board isn’t making any real accommodations for AP students.

They claim that they want to give every student a fair and equal testing opportunity, but they are also providing three different options: all in-person/on-paper written exams, half on-paper and half online exams, or digital exams only. With this level of variation, how can the experience be the same for every student? It is understandable that they need to provide an online option for coronavirus safety and precautions, but then they should only offer online ones; creating these different options makes an inherently unequal experience since some students prefer one or the other. Some may argue that the students who work from home and take the exam online are more enabled to cheat, which is true. However, there are also a lot of disadvantages to taking the online exams. Students will not be able to go back to questions that they have already completed, nor will they be able to move back-and-forth between questions that are unanswered. This means that they will have to stick with a question until they answer it, and will need to be sure that they are correct until they decide to move on. This means that the normal test-taking methods that students are used to, like skipping a question they are stuck on and coming back to it later or checking their work at the end, are no longer available to them. Compared to this, the 2020 AP exams were far better; they made the exams open-book, which put everyone on a level playing field, and allowed students to look back and check their work.

On top of this, the AP exam prices are still the exorbitant full price of $94; people were outraged last year that they had to pay that much for a 45 minute online exam. It’s extremely high, even for a full-length test, and this year, the story is the same. It’s extremely expensive, and what the College Board has been giving us for the last year in response to coronavirus has been disappointing to say the least, especially when it’s coming at such a hefty price.