Academic Approach Families & Colleagues:
We’re hearing more stories from you of successes and challenges with this week’s rollout of Advanced Placement (AP) tests. In particular, students taking the AP Calculus AB and BC on May 12th reported issues with system lag and uploading. Some are attributing these troubles to College Board’s servers, while College Board attributes them largely to outdated browsers.
We keep learning, especially lessons on tech troubleshooting and questions of appropriate student conduct.
Tech Troubles & Troubleshooting
The College Board has provided a useful tech troubleshooting page here and continues to promote their 5-step preparation protocol. However, the greatest concern for those who struggled with uploading answers are whether or not they’ll be forced to retest, even when in some cases they have time-stamped photos of their completed work.
Questions of Appropriate Student Conduct
The College Board has given guidance on what is considered acceptable open-book test behavior. And they’ve been clear about their standards of cheating. Nevertheless, reports of cheating rise as both an AP-specific phenomenon and a general trend in online testing.
Again, all these questions must and will lead to solutions eventually. Online testing has been here, is here, and will continue to be here on a larger scale going forward. This week’s AP tests have the dubious honor of serving as a unique national spectacle that centralizes these concerns in one intense period of uncharted territory for our students.
We encourage our students to remain flexible and resilient and to take the high road as they navigate this road toward higher ed.
Be well,
Matthew Pietrafetta, Ph.D., Founder & CEO
