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Twenty-eight Advanced Placement exams are going digital starting next May, Trevor Packer, the College Board’s head of AP programming, announced last Thursday at the annual AP conference in Las Vegas.
The move comes after the College Board rolled out its fully digital SAT this year, and the AP digital portions will be conducted on the same platform, the College Board’s Bluebook app. The College Board also recently acknowledged a massive overhaul of its AP scoring system
“We understand that this is a significant change,” Packer wrote in a statement. “We will work closely with the AP community throughout the year to ensure that schools have the information and resources they need to prepare.”
Sixteen AP course exams will be fully digital, with no paper option available. Those are primarily humanities courses, including AP English Language and Composition and U.S. History, as well as the computer science exams. Another 12 will be delivered in a hybrid format, with students writing free-response and graphing answers by hand to questions delivered digitally. Those are primarily for math and science courses, including AP Biology, Calculus and Statistics.
Another 12 AP exams—those with audio or portfolio components, primarily language and art exams—will remain unchanged.
Earlier this month, a College Board official confirmed to Inside Higher Ed that the company plans to expedite the digitization process after an international cheating ring prompted more score cancellations than usual, but they did not confirm a timeline or details. On the webpage detailing the changes, they confirmed that “the continued security” of exams was a factor in the accelerated timeline.
