With the 2025 Advanced Placement (AP) testing season newly concluded, the two-week period of exams welcomed a new format: completely computerized tests.
“I definitely liked the change for a lot of my AP exams,” junior Liad Studnik said. “I think doing it on paper was kind of time-consuming, and having the tests online made everything a lot easier.”
For the past 70 years, AP exams have been on paper, with students having to write, calculate or answer questions in physical testing booklets. In recent years, College Board, the organization that distributes and creates these tests, has begun to innovate its processes to fit a technologizing world.
“I thought that digital AP testing went a lot better than expected because I think everyone had very negative feelings about it, but it ended up being okay,” junior Eva Banafsheha said.
Going into this testing season, many students have never taken an online AP exam. There was skepticism surrounding how the tests would fare on school computers and worries about what would happen in situations where computers crashed or technology failed.
“There were a few crashes, and there were also some digital problems, but for the most part the digital exams were fine for everyone,” Studnik said.
While testing on computers worked smoothly for a large part of the exam season, the end of the AP season saw a bit of a rough goodbye. The AP Spanish Language test ran long overtime, with extreme stress for the students in the exam, as well as for the students waiting to start their next one. Additionally, AP Physics 1 and AP Psychology students were hit with the scare of the whole College Board site crashing. Luckily for the school, the crashed exams bypassed the West Coast, and students were able to finish their exams.
“I feel like the difference was not that drastic between this year and last year,” Banafsheha said. “I had a hybrid exam for chemistry, and that was the closest in similarity to the tests I took years before, and I liked it because the free response question (FRQ) was on paper and the multiple choice questions (MCQ) were still online.”
Although several of the exams offered were given completely online, some were given hybrid exams, a mix between a digital and physical test. Many students who had doubts before testing began were left satisfied with the results the online exams gave.
“[Testing] is way faster online. The AP United States Government and Politics test that I took was online, and it was super quick,” senior Ayden Pile said. “Plus, I guess it’s more eco-friendly too.”
Overall, while skepticism over online AP testing remained, many students were pleasantly surprised by the new change that will hopefully make their AP experience simpler in the years to come.
“The ones that are fully online, I found that the college board did a good job of integrating the format onto our computers,” junior Liad Studnik “I think it was really easy to interact with the user interface and all the digital tools that we had for the exams.”
