The College Board, which is responsible for managing the administration of Advanced Placement (AP) exams, announced on July 25, that they will be transitioning towards digital AP exams as of May 2025.
The new digital exams will be taken on Bluebook, a testing application created by the College Board that has been previously utilized for SAT, ACT and PSAT testing. It is also used for digital practice testing and works with the Test Day Toolkit, the application used to administer College Board digital exams by testing coordinators.
The decision comes in the wake of the canceling of some scores from the 2024 testing season due to compromised test materials. According to the College Board newsite, All Access, paper exams require the completion of student information sheets before starting, leading to tests taking longer than expected.
College Board has announced 28 total exams that have transitioned. Within these 28, there are full digital exams for 16 courses such as Environmental Science and United States History alongside hybrid exams with digital multiple choice and paper-based writing for 12 courses such as Biology, AP Calculus AB & BC and AP Chemistry.
“Accelerating the digital transition will help us preserve the integrity of the AP Exam experience for students and educators,” head of the AP program, Trevor Packer, said in an interview with All Access.
With the new announcement, AP students new and old will have to adjust to digital testing.
“More students are comfortable with a paper test,” junior Vincent Castillo said. “My biggest concern is going to be on the FRQ sections because I know that I’m confident typing, but when I’m writing essays and answering a free-response question, I prefer to do it via paper and pencil just because I can erase or I can write little notes here and there. It feels more fluid to me.”
Students aren’t the only ones who have to adapt to the new environment of online testing. AP Teachers will have to adjust from preparing students for physical exams to digital testing, which comes with its own struggles.
“My first instinct is to say that taking a digital exam takes a different skill set,” AP Science teacher Lolithia Otero said. “Especially for an AP exam where the questions are wordy and can be confusing; there’s lots of descriptions of experiments or scenarios for the questions that having it on a screen limits how you interact with the question… I guess we’ll just have to see.”