By Dylan Harrison
AP exams have wrapped up and the year is coming to a close, but the 2021 AP exam experience was a lot different than in years past.
For example, most of the exams like AP Lang, AP Lit, APUSH and APES all saw changes to their formats. There were fewer multiple choice and more student produced response questions, as compared with last year’s truncated exams.
In an effort to prevent cheating on the exams, digital exams did not allow students to return to previous questions to check work or change your answer. This was particularly frustrating because if you finished a section early you would not be able to take another look at questions that you were maybe unsure about or just didn’t know.
For most of our schooling we have been taught to skip the difficult questions and come back to them at the end. For juniors and seniors in High School, it is very hard to adapt to a new test taking strategy so late in our scholastic careers. However this change, as well as scrambling the questions, may have been necessary steps for College Board to maintain the integrity of their exams.
It will be interesting to see how scores are impacted by a fully digital test. Could they be boosted because students had all their resources at their fingertips and were not monitored by proctors? Or will they fall because students struggled with the new format?
The “lockdown browser” certainly had its issues. I took my APUSH test on my MacBook and forgot to shut down my email application. During the test I received an email and the lockdown browser was sent into a split screen. The browser would not allow me to x out of the email so I took most of the test with half of my screen taken up by an ESPN fantasy alert. The help button didn’t work either and the whole time the stopwatch was ticking away.
I eventually figured out that I could leave the test and quit the application, but it caused much more stress than I needed during the test. You could definitely argue that it is my fault for forgetting to quit the application before testing; however, I would say that the help button should have worked better and the lockdown browser should not allow for anything besides the test to be displayed on the screen. Allowing emails to pop up not only distracts students but also defeats the purpose of a lockdown browser and does not preserve the integrity of the test.
Overall, testing in this format was not without its issues but College Board did the best they could given the circumstances. In a weird way I look forward to when we can take in-person exams again just to avoid all the complications that online testing causes.
