Every year in early June, North Allegheny students take their finals in the last days before summer. For many juniors and seniors, though, the real finals occur almost a month earlier, during AP tests, the three-hour college level exams. Traditionally, the entire school year in an AP class is focused on preparing students for the May exams rather than the typical end-of-year finals. Unfortunately, however, there is nothing traditional about this year. In the age of coronavirus, everything is affected—including AP exam administration. 

With governors across the country closing public schools, questions about AP testing immediately arose, and, given the initial lack of online instruction, AP students and teachers were getting behind on their material. For almost a week and a half after public schools closed, the College Board remained silent on the subject. It wasn’t until March 20th that the organization released an official statement about the 2020 AP testing schedule. 

Given that 91% of students surveyed still wanted to take AP exams, the College Board devised with a simple solution to the complications presented by the virus: cancel the in-person exams scheduled for May and replace them with online exams starting May 11, with make-up exams also available.  The full schedule is available on the College Board website. The College Board further announced that the AP exams will be taken as open note/open book exams.

With this announcement, however, there came another barrage of questions, concerns, and potential problems. 

One of the more pressing issues concerns academic integrity, or, more likely, the lack thereof. While an online testing format allows students to take the exams and still claim credit for their hard work, it opens the door to all manners of cheating, from plagiarism to group test-taking.

In an attempt to combat such potentialities, the online tests will not be organized in a traditional format. Rather than a multi-section, multiple choice and free-response test, the AP exams will be given as 45-minute free-response-only tests, excluding Studio Art and AP Seminar. The free-response questions will vary in style depending on subject matter. The AP Literature and Composition test, for example, will be a single prose analysis essay, while the Calculus BC exam will be a two part “multi-focus free response” exam. The College Board believes that this style of exam will make it significantly easier for test proctoring and integrity, as plagiarism-detection tools can easily compare all submitted answers. 

Yet while the College Board’s adaptations aid in limiting potential cheating, test score curving is another concern. Normally, all of the College Boards tests, both AP exams and SATs, are scored according to a curve, which grows or shrinks according to the test average. However, given the new test format, and the potential for cheating, the curve for this year’s AP tests is likely to be utterly unprecedented. Depending on the test, the format will make it either harder than usual and increase the curve or easier and decrease the curve. Grading, therefore, has the potential to be dramatically skewed, compromising the exam’s credibility. 

So while the novel coronavirus has already changed the lives of many students, the full extent is still yet to be seen. Will the at-home exams be easier because they’re shorter or harder because there is less room for error?  Will college credit policies remain the same even as the exam changes?  Will the potential for cheating skew the curve?

As the situation continues to develop, the College Board has pledged to continue its support to students. They are hosting free review sessions on their YouTube channel every week and online review materials are now easily accessible. While these are uncertain and confusing times, there is some small amount of relief in knowing that the College Board will not allow the hard work of it AP student to go to waste.