It would feel like being punched in the gut to have an AP exam crash right before submitting it. Hundreds of hours of class time and studying leading up to a single test, all for it to vanish into a black screen. A handful of students are most likely going to have to experience this feeling in the 2025 testing season due to College Board’s decision to administer nine AP exams digitally on their own BlueBook program. Switching to digital makes sense for AP; it’s easier to grade, transport, and prevent cheating on digital tests. Yet these benefits don’t directly translate to a smoother AP testing experience for students and teachers, rather, they hide a far more convoluted one that disrupts a decades-old system.

The change to digital exams forces schools to work around sporadic technological issues. Power outages, WiFi issues, or software glitches would completely derail students’ tests and force the school to reschedule and circumnavigate these completely unpredictable problems. Printed tests contain none of these issues, making them far more dependable than digital tests. For tests that are supposed to be standardized, shouldn’t the dependability of paper tests alone make them a better candidate than digital exams? How can College Board standardize these tests when some students may have a slower computer during a test where every second is crucial? Students prepare for a single exam over the course of an entire school year; College Board shouldn’t jeopardize that work just to grade exams faster. On top of this, College Board doesn’t have the cleanest track record when administering its BlueBook testing programs. When College Board administered their first ever digital exam, the fall 2023 PSAT, it was almost immediately canceled at some schools due to technical issues with exam setup. Last year’s AP Chinese exam crashed on students all over the East Coast, forcing them to reschedule the exams in the midst of an already chaotic testing season.

For most classes, a majority of the classwork and homework is done on paper, it being the central tool used within these classrooms for over a century. Naturally, students have become used to paper and more comfortable testing on paper. Having the exam online creates an unfamiliar testing environment, threatening the focus of a student during an exam. In order for teachers to accommodate students to the digital testing environment, they need to completely revise their teaching methods and move to online programs for students to learn, disregarding the already established methods they have systematically perfected over their careers. This also causes some students to use the school provided laptops which can take up to five minutes of class time each day just signing into and takes significantly more time to navigate compared to a teacher passing out papers for students to use. If the paper system has worked for so long, why take such a sudden shift to online exams? This recent switch is blamed on paper exam leaks in China, yet these exam leaks have happened over the entire course of AP’s history. Digital exams are not exempt from these leaks either, as when they were first introduced in 2020, answers were openly shared over social media, compromising exams completely.

Testing systems need to prioritize the well-being of their students, and the incorporation of digital testing disregards students rather than supports them. If the traditional testing system has worked for so long, why make such a drastic change? Paper tests are tactile and straightforward; there is a sense of structure and predictability, unlike digital exams. Millions of high school students are relying on these tests. Why take the risks of moving them to digital?