Thoughts on This Year's AP Exams
When the College Board decided that it was going to offer online AP Exams this year due to the COVID-19 crisis, I was impressed with the decision. I have a long, largely positive relationship with the organization and consider several of the opportunities that it provided me to be incredibly useful for my development as an educator. Many times, my main critique of the Board is that it can be somewhat inflexible, with its different divisions quite siloed. That wasn't happening here. I thought it was cool. And none of what follows below should be interpreted as a critique of anyone who the College Board employs to develop and administer AP Biology. I know these people very well, and they are great, responsive educators. The Board is lucky to have them and should do whatever it needs to keep them around. My critiques are pointed at the Board itself, and maybe the very senior planning and execution team involved with the decisions that I will discuss below.
As the online AP Exam initiative rolled out, I looked to get clarity on two points: First, given that the exam is 25% as long as it usually is on 75% of the content, I wondered if it would be offered for free/at a substantially reduced cost to students, all of whom are living through an unprecedented global crisis. The College Board was quite clear very early on that any student who wanted to cancel taking the crisis-modified exam could do so without penalty due to the situation. However, it didn't mention anything related to the cost of taking it for students who still wanted to. In the absence of new information, the status quo (full price to test for students) seemed to be the case. But I wanted confirmation on that. My second item for clarity was something that made much less sense than the fee structure: the suggestion that all students on the planet would be sitting for the exam at the same time. This seemed wildly strange to me, given that the earth is a sphere that takes 24 hours to rotate. That being the case, a student taking the AP Biology exam at 2 PM EST, would be taking it at 2 AM the next day local time in Singapore, to say nothing of children in every other time zone on the planet having to take it at more or less appropriate times of the day/night. That is bonkers. And because it is bonkers, I asked the College Board for clarity. I got it:
This year, the College Board is requiring all students sitting for any AP Exam, anywhere on the planet, to do so synchronously at full price.
I'm going to leave the full price issue aside in what follows, except where it intersects with the more significant problem of globally synchronous administration. Because globally synchronous administration is totally inappropriate. Here are a collection of reasons in the order in which they occur to me:
The official reason given for the need to administer this exam this year in this way is "test security." The only way this is the case is if there is exactly ONE version of this test. But the test is entirely composed of two essay questions from the normal exam's six questions. Each question is different, and the exam students are taking this year are repurposed versions of question 1 and question 4. The idea that there isn't at least one other test's-worth of questions 1 and 4 in development is incredible to me. This is particularly true since the Board has released two full-length practice exams over the past two months, and currently plans to release a third at the end of April. If the Board is really so desperate for enough questions 1 and 4 to field two exams, why not pull them from the third practice exam before they release it? But they shouldn't have to do that, because exam development takes years. So there must be multiple possible future questions 1 and 4 in the hopper. If the Board can’t operationalize another set, one has to wonder about the overall sturdiness of the alternative testing structure they are employing this year.
I find various aspects of cognitive psychology to be more/less useful for my own thinking about learning, and I'm sure most readers do, too. But I don't see ANY evidentiary support for the idea that a student taking an AP Exam at 2 AM is going to be in a cognitively optimal headspace. And remember that most of our students are taking multiple exams over multiple days. So the Board is asking our students (and, I wish to stress, every student on this half of the planet) to quite possibly spend a week disrupting their circadian rhythms to take tests. In the middle of a traumatic global crisis. One would think that an organization that is frequently accused of harming children with their testing practices would be sensitive to actually harming children with their testing practices, but here we are.
One thing I've always liked about the Board is its stated commitment to equity and access for AP courses. Trevor Packer was quite clear about this in his presentation to all teachers of AP subjects last week. He urged us all to encourage any of our students who might be uneasy about challenging the exam this year to do so. I'm into that notion. It's foundational to my philosophy as a teacher. But I won’t be doing that this year because of how this exam is being administered to students (though, honesty demands me to note that given my personal situation, I also don’t have to do it. My students are almost uniformly game to meet the Board on whatever unleveled field of play they might design, with a few having decided many moons ago that the exam was not anything of personal meaning to them. This is because my students this year, like every other year, are incredible people.). As to equity and access, globally synchronous administration of the exams clearly puts the lie to that sentiment. Not only is it de-privileging students on this side of the world, but it's also giving students in America a giant advantage asterisk for their own testing this year. All of this in a year where the Board doesn't even have a universal understanding that colleges and universities that have historically given credit for AP exam scores will do so with the new format. How it is that ETS can justify this inequality of testing environments is beyond me, but I'm admittedly not a psychometrician.
These are my major complaints. I don't think any of them are overboard, unfair, or poorly reasoned (if I do say so myself). I would personally love the concerns detailed above to be clearly addressed by the Board, but I won't hold my breath. They don't owe me, or any other teacher, anything. But I do think they should be doing better by the students who they claim to serve. Just like every year, this year I’ll do everything in my power to support and prepare the students in my class who will challenge this test to the best of my ability. But unlike every other year, this year students have had to learn challenging subjects in an unprecedented crisis (in my case generally thousands of miles away from dear friends and family). Why any of this should make this year’s students any less deserving of a fair shake on the upcoming exam than prior cohorts is not likely to be something I’ll ever understand
At the very least, the Board should be open and honest about this situation, and clearly indicate that the requirements of their exams this year mean that students who are not in America may well be testing in unequal situations that will not provide the same sort of validity or reliability that a "normal" AP Exam administration would (and maybe give those students another way to demonstrate competence outside of a test that is rigged against them). Absent that type of clear messaging, or a change in course, the College Board is pursuing a reckless approach to testing.
They College Board should do better than whatever this is. They are certainly capable of it.
I welcome any and all comments on this piece. You can do that in the comments, here or here.
