Conditionally, students in Advanced Placement (AP) classes strive to achieve a high level of comprehension and critical thinking through their year-long school course for the ultimate goal of receiving college credit in high school on the formative exam in May following their course. However, the modernization of the AP exams to be almost completely digital (with a few math and science free response questions) is limiting how students break down the exam and preventing them from achieving their highest levels.
In May 2025, College Board, the administering organization of AP, made the switch to a digital-based format, making the set of 2026 exams the second of the digital kind. This affected 28 out of the total 38 exams available through College Board, 16 being fully on a computer and 12 utilizing a hybrid system with both online and paper sections of the test.
According to Education Week, the motive behind the switch was to prevent high numbers of cheating cases through smuggled materials resulting in cancelled tests. Further, the digital format is also argued to help students manage their time by typing over handwriting and having a clock on their screen.
In contrast, just locally at Liberty, students taking the 2025 AP exams had great difficulty due to technological malfunctions. Whole tests were postponed, such as AP Human Geography and AP Chemistry, because of Wifi fluctuations at the testing location of St. Gabriel the Archangel Catholic Church. As a result, these students had to reschedule the exam to a later date after the school year had ended, wasting their studying, preparation and teacher impact of the class because of the increased time span between the class and the exam.
Personally, the test I took on paper, AP Human Geography in 2024, was much more straightforward than any other test I have taken. The multiple-choice was in a packet that I could annotate on, as well as the free response question, allowing me to break down questions and answers effectively and thoroughly plan out my answers before writing.
While AP Human Geography is noted as an entry-level AP course and exam, I still felt as though it was much more approachable than my 2025 exam of AP European History. This test was fully digital, besides scrap paper, where I could not annotate my document-based questions or any prompts with anything but the highlighting tool and note pad feature on the College Board
I believe this invalidates the argument that online has better time management because, especially for document and writing-based exams like the AP histories and Englishes, the platform tools are much less efficient to use than a pen and paper that can quickly underline, make notes about the text and plan out writing structures.
Taking away one of student’s most beneficial ways of achieving in a test, being able to work out worded prompts with pencils, much outweighs the pros of online testing. “The Screen Inferiority Effect refers to the phenomenon where people tend to comprehend and retain less information when reading on screens compared to reading on paper,” Oxford Learning stated. “It has been widely found that screen readers consistently score lower on reading comprehension tests than paper readers.”
Teachers, at least in my experience, have taught students to perform test-like scenarios on paper. For example, in my AP United States History class, we practice writing short answer and long essay questions on notebook paper, and in AP Language and Composition we have printed out prompts and documents in our practice essays.
If the people teaching the classes believe that paper will help their students do better on practice, College Board should use the same style in their tests to accurately gather what students have learned over the year, not their ability to use online tools and comprehend online texts.
Now, this is not all to say that technology can not help students in the long run. Typing answers can be much faster than handwriting, but there should be printed prompts to annotate. Multiple choice online is more confidential for the answers than paper, but students should have packets to go through and underline the questions.
Exams that have the option to handwrite annotations, even with a hybrid typing and hand annotating, will help students to have a better understanding of what the test is asking them to do and utilize the information and practice they have gotten all year. Ultimately, I believe that this will overall increase performance in the May exam.
