College Board, a large corporation that offers Advanced Placement exams for high school students, has been in the spotlight lately, and for the wrong reasons. There has been considerable criticism about how their exam measures are not preventive enough and how their test-taking app is not functioning properly, often experiencing glitches.
In AP classes, students are often presented with a set of rules established by College Board for their exams. Some rules include having a see-through water bottle, no notes or outside resources, no talking or looking at someone else’s screen during the exam and not discussing anything related to the exam. For free response questions, people can’t talk about them until they get released two days later, but for multiple choice, the College Board made it so that they can never be mentioned or talked about.
Now comes the important action of making sure rules are enforced and preventing cheating. These rules aren’t being enforced, as students, after exams are done, are often heard in the hallways discussing what was on the exam or texting in their group chats to their friends. In addition to that, students have often reported that they are talking during the exam, or even slightly peeking at other people’s screens.
College Board emphasizes the security of their exams, but relies on schools to enforce it. For such a big organization like College Board, this shouldn’t happen. They need to establish tools or invest in resources for schools that they can use to secure tests.
One solution that could be implemented to help with the ongoing test issues is not making different versions, but giving students in one area the same exam. Give each small group of students or each student a different version of the exam. Although students may still share with some groups about their exam, cheating will be less pervasive because of the diverse options. Some may also argue that a significantly larger number of versions will need to be created by College Board than they currently produce. Although that may be true, we are talking about test security, which is important.
Another solution that can help is to use AI-proctoring. When I took my NEWL [National Exam in World languages] language exam for credit, there was an AI proctor that was monitoring screen switches, eye movement, the number of tabs opened, and more. This will force students to focus on their own work, exam, and not even think about any else next to them. Now, some may say that AI cannot always be trusted and might count a specific movement or action as cheating when it’s really not. Although there is a valid concern there, if an AI is being used on exams or tests, it has to be better tested and trained which I’m sure the college board would do before applying it to major exams like APs.
