Many students who are enrolled in AP courses spend the school year adapting to the swift pace of timed tests, choosing between exam strategies and preparing themselves for the challenge — and potential disappointment — of the spring testing season. College Board’s recent decision to transition numerous paper-based exams to a digital format only complicates this process. The change to online testing is likely to threaten students’ content understanding and scores, worsening their relationship to exams, academic anxiety and the significance of the education they receive.
In May of 2025, College Board will discontinue on-paper testing for 28 AP exams, instead facilitating online testing for these subjects via the application Bluebook. This transition enables students to take an AP exam even if they happen to miss the testing day. However, this accommodation hardly makes up for the obstacles associated with digital learning.
Decades of research suggest that students’ scores more accurately reflect their academic understanding when provided paper-based assignments and exams rather than digital. A 2019 study initiated by psychologists Ben Backes and James Cowan determined that the majority of K-12 students exposed to digital exams performed worse than others who routinely took their tests on paper. Despite the groups’ equal study time, the digital scores suggested that the corresponding students had been given fewer months to prepare than the others. The study also found that students from low-income backgrounds were more likely to perform poorly on digital tests than those from middle- or high-income backgrounds. Digital test-takers reported feeling disconnected from the test’s content, which partially explains their scores. Physical paper-tests provide students the option to flip back and forth between subjects, while screens restrict interaction between test-takers and the assessment content.
In addition to hindering scores, College Board’s partial transition to digital tests also has the potential to alter less visible performance factors, such as students’ academic anxiety. It’s difficult enough for students to prepare for traditional paper-based AP tests, but now, they must learn how to interact with a completely different assessment model. This only reinforces performance-related stress, which is already extremely prevalent in the majority of students taking AP courses. An entire school year’s work is either justified or deemed useless according to a single exam and the resulting numbers. Naturally, it makes sense that the thought of changed testing conditions would only further encourage unhealthy worry about test-takers’ own academic competence and self-worth.
College Board’s decision to abandon the research-supported model of paper-based testing also invalidates the institution’s mission, giving students reason to lose faith in it. Though it has been proven that test-takers are more likely to excel when provided paper-based tests rather than digital, College Board has denied students access to the better model merely to simplify the grading process. Not only was this decision made in direct opposition to extensive research; it also contradicts College Board’s to empower students. By prioritizing an efficient means of grading before students’ likelihood of success and fulfillment, the organization has further exploited the young people it claims to uplift.
