Sitting down in a big auditorium as proctors walk down each aisle with scantrons and anxiously bouncing your leg is an experience that many of us can recall and relate to. However, this experience may look different within the next couple of years. In the last couple of years, many school systems, as well as administrators of the SAT, have been making the transfer to online materials, but now, exams are being moved online too. For the first time, students across the country have gotten a taste of the change this AP exam season, which began May 6th. WJ students, including myself, experienced this change with the online AP Literature exam.
Earlier in the year, the College Board had announced that the exam would be taken on paper, despite students preparing in class using scantrons and doing timed writings on paper. However, the day before the Exam, the College Board decided to switch to online. This is my first issue with AP exams: teachers did not prepare us for it to be online. It may be because they are just starting to prepare for the change and everything is new, but it was quite frustrating to find out all my time practicing with timed writings was for nothing since I had to type on the day of the exam.
My second issue with the switch to online exams is the simple fact that I prefer to write. I know many students prefer typing, but for me, I never truly learned how to type in an efficient manner so I just use my pointer fingers which is really slow. I feel when I write I think about what I am saying, which makes my claims more meaningful. Also, I write quicker than I type, and it flows much smoother when putting it on paper.
Another issue that bothered me slightly was the fact that none of the proctors in the exam room really knew what to do when there were technical difficulties. I understand this will get better over time, but this whole switch to an online exam the day before the exam seemed very rushed and the College Board didn’t prepare teachers for it very well. Moreover, some kids had technological issues, meaning people were behind on the timing, which then led to people taking their breaks at different times. This resulted in students having to wait on other students when the whole exam was over.
My last small critique was that because my experience was with the AP Literature and Composition exam, I found it annoying and tedious to try and annotate the texts online. For the online exam, you have to highlight the text then choose if you want to annotate it, color it and then write any comments you may have. I also found that sometimes when I did make annotations, it would delete my previous work when I moved to the next question. Overall, the annotating and highlighting feature was tedious and time-consuming. Normally on paper exams, I can annotate very quickly as I read and it will stay there but this was not the case with online exams.
While I am criticizing the online exams very heavily, I do understand a lot of it comes down to personal preference and the simple fact that it will take time to get used to it. Many of the issues are things the College Board could fix and make better in the future so I have no doubt that this will become a standardized practice within the next few years. Students will soon have forgotten all about what paper exams used to be like. They might even be asking what a scantron is.
