Through calling, emailing, posts on social media and more, students express their frustration with the College Board’s system over technological and other issues over AP Exams.
The College Board decided to move AP Exams online for the 2019-2020 school year due to COVID-19 school closings across America. According to the College Board, 99% of 1.6 million AP Exams were submitted with no difficulties involved.
However, the posts about the College Board along with comments on College Board pages across the internet on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter may suggest otherwise. Many students are posting emotional videos of their “Submit” buttons glitching, unable to submit or put to use a year’s worth of work in their classes.
These students must request makeup exams, according to the nonprofit, and will not receive a confirmation that they can take them again until the week after all AP exams are over.
Students should not need to bear the weight of the mistakes that the College Board itself made. The organization should have ensured an airtight submission ability for tens of thousands of students submitting at once or should have canceled the exams. When they were not quite sure of the ability of their system to handle these submissions, the College Board should have shut down AP testing for one year. Instead, students are taking these exams hoping to receive college credit and receive nothing but a request for a makeup test.
After the backlash it received over not addressing student concerns about AP Exams, the College Board finally responded by allowing students to email-in their responses immediately after the exam is over if the student was unable to submit their response.
However, this practice doesn’t remedy the mental and emotional toll on students who took their exams the week before and could not submit for the same reasons.
“I think they did a good thing by creating the backup emails you can send your test to if it didn’t submit, but they should have thought of something like that before we started taking the tests,” High school student Buffy Toledo said. “Now, because of something that wasn’t even my fault, I have to be punished and retake the test. I studied everyday for hours and I’m still doing that for the retake, when all I wanted was to be finished with this test.”
Toledo posted a video on TikTok clicking her “Submit” button again and again for her AP Chemistry Exam without the response going through and garnering over 487.1 thousand views and thousands of sympathetic comments.
“This same thing happened to thousands of kids and a lot of them reached out to me. I think it helped a lot of people understand they weren’t alone when this whole thing happened and we’ll all be taking the retake together,” Toledo said.
Additionally, instead of focusing on making sure that their servers could handle students’ submissions, the College Board instead poured energy and time into making sure that students couldn’t cheat on their AP tests.
Although the organization stated that this year the exams were “open note/open book,” the College Board said that they “may post content designed to confuse and deter those who attempt to cheat.”
Fake accounts asking for help on AP tests popped up on many different social media platforms. Students on Reddit started speculating that the subreddit APtests2020 was made to catch cheating test takers. The theory was backed by odd uses of slang and formal language by subreddit creator Dinosauce313 and the account’s creation date around two weeks before the exams started.
Other accounts allegedly masquerading as students directly messaged high school students on platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, asking for answers for AP exams.
This behavior by the College Board is not unimaginable as they said that they would be “monitoring social media and discussion sites to detect and disrupt cheating,” and allegations of child entrapment soon surfaced.
According to an article by the Washington Post, the nonprofit is now being sued by parents and the National Center of Fair and Open Testing on behalf of students for “breach of contract, gross negligence, misrepresentation and violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act.”
A lawsuit is long overdue for this so-called “non profit” which, according to a Business Insider article, makes hundreds of millions of dollars every year off of students taking the SATs and AP exams. Students taking AP exams this year paid $95 per course for a 45 minute online exam that many couldn’t submit.
More and more students are calling for a change in this education monopoly so that it doesn’t take advantage of students as it did not only this year but all of the years before. People are starting to see the true nature of the College Board.