Why I am Disappointed in the College Board

Editor Quintus, as one of his last tasks of the 2020 school year, assigned the Blog Staff the theme “Awakening.” Luke finds he’s had an “awakening” regarding the College Board’s handling of this year’s AP exams.

By Luke Langlois, AP Student

If you are a long-time reader, you would recall that I wrote a post a while ago encouraging students to take AP courses for a variety of reasons including (but not limited to), the challenge, the thrill, the actual learning, and college credit. While I still encourage students to take more challenging courses, it is because of the teachers and your peers, not the College Board. I have never been one to call out the College Board for being a greedy nonprofit (and trust me, there is plenty of that out there) because, at the end of the day, they tend to put out a strong product. Undoubtedly, these examinations favor society’s more affluent, but, for the most part, they accurately reflect how successful a student will be in college or a student’s AP course knowledge. This year, however, has been an awakening for me regarding this organization. The AP exams this year are, simply put, a poor way to measure a student’s course knowledge. Here’s why:

• A year’s worth of coursework CANNOT be accurately assessed in 45 minutes: If you are not in touch with the AP system, exams usually last three hours, and even then,  the accuracy of the assessments are questioned. Due to this year’s pandemic, these exams have been cut down to 45 minutes. It almost seems comical when I write it down. Imagine condensing 180 days (or more) of instructional time to 45 minutes, or the equivalent of one class period. That is BONKERS and makes these exams so much more “luck” based. We all have weak points, and sometimes questions on assessments just don’t click with us. We answer the question, and we move on, but there are always other questions to make up for it. Not this year. If a student does not “click” with a particular literature or rhetoric passage, suck it up! If a student blanks on one calculus concept, deal with it! And, in the case of some APs, a student could be completely inept in huge chunks of the course and still get a good score for knowing how to do one part. How does that accurately measure whether you deserve college credit? Literature, for example, is testing only a prose passage. Does it matter if I read any poetry? Nope! 
• Students abroad are having to take the exams in the dead hours of the night: Ever taken an exam at 1:30 a.m.? AP students in India have! Students with parents who are in the military or work traveling jobs not only have to take an AP exam in a completely new format, they have to do it at freakish times. Any test-taking guide will tell you that half the battle in a test is being comfortable with your environment. Yet, students around the world are having to disrupt their sleep schedules and take these exams tired. I understand that there are security concerns and thus the test “MUST” be administered at the same time. Would it have been so difficult for a billion-dollar organization to create a few more test problems (a test of 45 minutes, no less) to let these students take their tests at a reasonable time?
• Equity issues are exacerbated and preventing cheating is much more difficult: Imagine having to open the AP exam and upload your responses, whether it be typed or photographed, on your mom’s old phone with a barely functioning operating system. Unfortunately, this is the only device in your modest house, a house where finding a quiet place to take the exam is impossible. Now, imagine taking the exam with your phone to photograph and upload, your laptop to display your notes, and your desktop to display the prompt inside your sound-proof room on top of your spacious desk. The College Board does offer limited accommodations, but there is nothing that can truly close this gap. Now, this is intertwined with the issue of cheating because it would be incredibly easy to hire someone else to take the exam for you. I went through the security checks and, trust me, it would not be difficult to bypass that. On the same note, what happens if one of my parents is a calculus teacher? Perhaps they would be ethical, but we all know that parents have paid half a million dollars for SAT advantages; why wouldn’t a parent give their kid an advantage for free? This year, the teachers are able to view the exams, allowing them to see if the work matches the student, which may be able to counteract this to an extent, but that is certainly not foolproof. As far as student-only cheating goes, the College Board has said that there are systems in place to prevent it, and they claim to have recently caught cheaters. But, in reality, the College Board would need impossible levels of surveillance set up to truly prevent cheating. Indeed, the federal government would not even have the Constitutional authority to do what the College Board claims it is doing. It may be a minority of students participating in such devious activities, but I assure you it is enough students to ruin the integrity of already shoddy examinations.
• Exams are still full price: Each AP exam costs $94. That means you are spending over 2 dollars a minute to take an AP exam. Such value! 

Look, I could go on (I did not even mention the problems students with learning differences are facing trying to get accommodations), but I hope you are awakened to at least some of the issues. The administration of this year’s AP examinations has been a serious misstep by the College Board. I do acknowledge that they are in an incredibly difficult spot, with a majority of students polled saying that they want to continue with the exams, but so much could have been done. When an organization essentially has a monopoly on the testing market, we should hold them to a higher standard. 

Awakening Editor: Quintus Ni