Keyboards, typing and clicking will now be commonplace in testing rooms. 

After the 2023-24 school year saw an increase in cheating on Advanced Placement (AP) paper exams, the College Board made the decision to transition more quickly to online testing. Students will now take many of their exams on a secured application called Bluebook, as 28 AP exams will be digital as of May 2025, according to the College Board. Twelve will be hybrid digital exams, with work being completed by hand as well as digitally, and the other 16 will be completely digital. This shift comes one year after the College Board’s SAT went completely digital in the spring of 2024. 

For Dalton Lyon, AP United States History teacher, this change came unexpectedly. 

“I was expecting that this would happen much later,” he said. “I think the surprise for us as teachers is the suddenness of it. I thought that we would be given a little more flexibility to have a hard-copy version.” 

Many of these exams have been hard copies since the beginning, and many students prefer paper over digital. Sophomore Abby Portnoy, who is taking the AP Psychology exam in May, raised concerns about the complexity of the digital exams. 

“The online [exams] stress me out because of all the circles and the numbers and the timer and the colors and the lines,” Portnoy said. “I am a really slow typer, so I’m going to struggle on this FRQ [Free Response Question].”

She isn’t the only one who prefers taking the exams on paper. Junior Ellie Midha hand-wrote all of her AP exams last year, yet despite some temporary pain, she prefers that traditional method.  

“My hands hurt a lot, especially for the AP U.S. History [exam] last year,” Midha said. “It was a lot of writing, but it’s also nice to annotate passages. [Online], I can’t easily cross out multiple-choice answers, and that’s important for the process of elimination. I prefer paper.”

Senior Casey Scobey, who did part of her AP exams online last year due to an injury on her dominant hand, said she feels comfortable with both methods. However, she holds a similar preference for doing them on paper.

“I thought it was pretty similar because I did the multiple choice on paper, and all I did was type the MCQs [multiple-choice questions] and SAQs [self-assessment questionnaires] online, and it was just in a Google Doc,” Scobey said. “I thought it was decently easy. It felt very similar. I feel like paper feels more serious to me and more real, but I was fine with both.”

To help with this change, some teachers are adjusting the way they prepare students. Caroline Goodman, AP Language and Composition teacher, is having to adapt the way she teaches annotation for the new digital format.

 

 

“For one of the essays that we write, students have to analyze an argument,” Goodman said. “When you do that on paper, you read and annotate the argument with your pen or with your pencil by hand, and you can make marginal notes, get yourself all organized and then write the essay. With the digital test, students are not going to have a paper copy of the argument that they have to analyze, so I had to really think about how I could help students learn how to annotate and note take on a digital piece of paper so that they could be prepared to write the analysis essay.”

Since she first began teaching AP Language and Composition 22 years ago, Goodman has always had her students write their work by hand in practice for the exam. Since the shift to digital, very little of students’ writing is handwritten. 

“It really threw me for a loop when I was required to go digital only because I had successfully taught the class for so many years, teaching students how to do it by hand,” Goodman said. “If I believe in practicing the way you’re going to perform, then we no longer need to be handwriting in class. We need to be typing if students are going to type for the test.” 

Despite these changes, Goodman believes that students’ performances will remain unaffected, even while she adjusts to new methods. 

“The students didn’t know any different, so I don’t really think it bothered them at all,” Goodman said. “I think it bothered me, because I’ve done this, taught the same skills for so long the same way, and so for me, it was a big shift. But I think the students hardly even were bothered by it.”

While some online practice tools were not available to students who took AP Language and Composition during the first semester, junior Lindsey Massey still felt that Goodman’s changes helped in getting them ready for this adjustment. 

“She prepared us well with what she could do at the time,” Massey said. “We took our essays in AP classroom, but at the time, they did not have the editing tools for annotating so we couldn’t annotate the text online and get used to how it’s going to be for the exam. She gave it to us on paper, but we usually do all the multiple choice online and type our essays.” 

Because his class is already taught mainly online, AP Computer Science teacher Hal Roberts decided to keep his class the same as in previous years. 

“I didn’t really make any changes, because all of my testing and quizzing is already online,” Roberts said. “So for the most part, the kids are developing the skills they need to do stuff online. As we get close to the exam, we’ll do a little bit of learning about the exam platform.”

Lyon has stuck to his usual methods but incorporated a little more online practice.

“I’d say the one thing that I’ve changed is that there will be more digital practice, and potentially not just practice, but actual assessments digitally,” Lyon said. 

Lyon has introduced fewer online tests and assignments due to his concern over digital tools that are easily accessible for cheating. 

“One of the reasons why I don’t do as many [online] assessments is because of the layout of my class, and the challenges regarding the Honor Code and the honor system doing something by hand versus on the computer,” Lyon said. “For many years, I was on the Honor Council. I was the faculty representative, and one of the things that taught me is to remove as many temptations as they are to cheat that I can, and handwriting is one of those ways, especially in the age of AI now.”

While he is not the only one worried about the usage of AI, Goodman believes that students are setting themselves up to fail if they choose to cheat. 

“If a kid gets through an AP class with a decent grade but uses AI to help them at home, they don’t actually learn how to do the thinking and the writing on their own,” Goodman said. “So I kind of feel like the consequence to that is built into the class, which means that I don’t worry too much about policing it. However, most of the writing that I have my students do in AP is done in the classroom for that exact reason, because I think the temptation is too great to just look something up if you’re at home in addition to AI.”

As the exam dates approach, students and teachers will soon see the full effects of this change.