Why Most AP Exams Are Going Digital This May

By Ileana Najarro — July 25, 2024 3 min read

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Twenty-eight Advanced Placement exams will go digital as early as May 2025 in response to an increased number of cheating attempts this past May, the nonprofit announced on Wednesday.

The decision fast-tracks the nonprofit’s previously reported plan to roll out digital options for AP exams over the next five to 10 years. For this year, AP allowed eight courses’ exams to be taken digitally on its application, Bluebook. In May, 16 total exams will be fully digital and 12 will be hybrid, meaning students will view questions online but write their free-response answers in a physical paper booklet.

An increased number of canceled AP exams tied to cheating attempts prompted the move to digital for 2025 said Trevor Packer, head of the AP program in a statement.

“Unfortunately, this year, we saw a rise in bad actors compromising AP Exam content for financial gain,” Packer said. “We were able to avoid large-scale cancellations only because none of the compromised material was distributed broadly. But we believe that paper AP testing will continue to be vulnerable to theft and cheating.”

A spokesperson for the College Board clarified that an increased number of students purchased stolen exam materials this year. Though this resulted in an increased number of canceled exams, the total number of cancellations remained a fraction of one percent of exams—as in prior years.

In an interview with Education Week last year, Packer said that digital AP exams could offer flexibility for schools on block schedules for administering the tests. In his Wednesday statement, he added that the tests would help students respond more quickly, since they could type rather than handwrite answers, and that the digital exams are more secure than shipping paper exams to thousands of locations weeks in advance.

John Moscatiello, founder and chief executive of Marco Learning, a consulting group helping schools and students with AP programs, said that students and teachers using digital AP exams in 2023 and 2024 have preferred the format.

He added that some AP teachers are already planning to help their students become faster at typing in preparation for the timed exam in May. Schools will need to plan for digital AP exams at scale.

The scaling-up work concerns Richard Tench, a counselor at St. Albans High School in West Virginia.

While his school is a 1-to-1 technology district where students are very familiar with technology and where teachers have time to prepare them for testing by May, not all districts have such a deep connection with technology.

“If technology is not already being utilized in the classroom in the coursework around this very advanced, and sometimes very tricky material for students, it really is going to be tricky for educators and students alike to figure out how to strategically plan for taking a digital AP exam,” Tench said. “Teachers are not just teaching content. They’re teaching these very creative and very critical thinking skills on the best test-taking strategies for AP.”

The College Board said test previews will be available for all subjects in the Bluebook app later in the 2024-25 school year and students will be able to access free online practice exams, quizzes, and other teacher-created assessments in the AP Classroom website.

The nonprofit also committed to providing schools with loaner devices and Wi-Fi support as needed.

Here are the AP courses impacted this school year:

Fully digital AP subjects