Thousands of students who took Advanced Placement tests this week will have to do it all over again.
All because of an apparent tech glitch.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, high school students are taking the exams online this year. The high-stakes tests can earn students college credit.
According to reports on social media and experiences shared in an online petition, when some students went to submit their answers, a message popped up saying their answers weren’t received and they’d have to take the test again in June.
Fairfax County resident Aidan Kane, 17, is one of those students affected by the tech issues with an AP exam. On Wednesday, the Woodson High School junior sat down at his desktop computer 30 minutes before his AP Calculus exam, making sure he was ready to start.
The problems started immediately.
He found he couldn’t log in. “I was, like, freaking out. It was 30 minutes before the test; I couldn’t get in,” Kane said.
He tried his phone. That didn’t work. He then tried logging in from his laptop. That worked.
He got through the first question, feeling pretty good about his answer. A solid student, he’d found the AP Calculus course challenging and had poured a lot of effort into it.
Kane began the process of submitting his answer, which meant taking a screenshot of his work and uploading it. Again, there was an issue. “It just kept loading and wouldn’t let me do anything,” he said.
Suddenly, the next question flashed onto the screen, an indication that the window to submit his work had closed. Kane recalled his stunned, then angry reaction.
At first, he said all he could do was think “oh my God.” Then, he said, “It was unreal — that 30 seconds of just pure frustration and anger.”
He had done everything right, he thought. He had prepared, he had studied the instructions to make sure he had understood the testing process.
His parents, like many around the D.C. region, were working from home — on their computers — when they heard the shouting from Kane’s room. They rushed up to see what was wrong, and his mom, Anne-Marie O’Brien, said he was devastated. He kept repeating, “It’s gone,” she said.
All the work he’d done during the year, all the preparation, all the effort put into a course that challenged him — gone. To see her son so upset was startling. “That’s not like him,” she said.
O’Brien and her husband are both professors, and she said that since the AP exam answers are time-stamped, she thinks the College Board should accept work from students who experienced similar issues.
O’Brien has administered tests using Blackboard and said that platform can help test administrators see what goes on during the testing process.
“Blackboard lets me do that — I can go in and see if a student gets shut out, how long they’ve been on the exam, what were they doing per question — and there would have been a way for a student to verify that they did complete the exam in time,” O’Brien said.
She thinks the same should be true for the AP exams.
Kane said he’ll likely retake the June exam. “In my situation, just the best outcome is I get my exam ticket in June, I keep up with my work, and see where it goes from there,” he said.
There’s an online petition on Change.org that has garnered more than 11,000 names as of Friday evening, and it’s calling on the College Board, which administers the tests, to allow students to resubmit work they still have saved on their computers.
“We’ve studied hard for the last few weeks and were looking forward to earning some college credit today,” the petition reads. “Now we might have to retake our tests several weeks from now or lose our chance to get college credit.”
The College Board hasn’t directly addressed the petition, but in a series of statements and tweets this week said millions of students have taken the exams so far and more than 99% were able to successfully submit their responses.
In one of the tweets, the College Board said it heard from some students who had trouble cutting and pasting their responses to submit them.
“We took a closer look and found that outdated browsers were a primary cause of these challenges,” the College Board said in the tweet.
While more than 99% of students successfully submitted their AP Exam responses today, some who didn’t told us they had trouble cutting and pasting their responses. We took a closer look and found that outdated browsers were a primary cause of these challenges.
— The College Board (@CollegeBoard) May 13, 2020
In a follow-up statement to InsideHigherEd, the College Board said: “We share the deep disappointment of students who were unable to complete their exam — whether for technical issues or other reasons. We’re working to understand these students’ unique circumstances in advance of the June makeup exams. Any student who encountered an issue during their exam will be able to retest.”
The College Board is encouraging students to follow some tech troubleshooting tips both before they take their exams and if they encounter any issues during their tests.
Friday marked the fifth day of the first-ever online, at-home AP exam administration. In this first week of the two-week testing period, AP students have taken 2.186 million exams.
