The first week of the College Board’s vast online-testing experiment was riddled with technical glitches that kept many students from uploading their answers to Advanced Placement exams. Heading into Week 2, the organization created a workaround for those encountering technical problems with the tests, which will continue through Friday.
As of Monday, students unable to upload their responses through the regular process would be able to email them to the College Board immediately after the exam, the organization said. Under that “backup email-submission process,” all test takers who get a message saying “We Did Not Receive Your Response” would receive instructions for transmitting their answers via an email address unique to each user. They would have 10 minutes to do so.
The new policy is cold comfort for frustrated students who hit snags last week, though. “To ensure the validity of all exam responses,” the College Board said in its announcement of the backup process, “we’re unable to accept submissions from students who tested May 11–15.”
As The Chronicle reported on Friday, test takers around the world reported technical difficulties during the first five days of Advanced Placement exams, which students are taking online at home this year because of the pandemic. The most frequently cited problem was the inability to submit responses to completed questions.
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Students last week took nearly 2.2 million AP exams in a total of 15 subjects. The “vast majority” of them successfully completed their exams, the College Board said in a written statement. Each day, the organization said, less than 1 percent of test takers encountered technical difficulties.
But the organization’s numbers didn’t seem to square with what many high-school counselors were hearing. In emails to The Chronicle, more than two dozen said at least 5 to 10 percent of their students had faced technical problems that kept them from submitting exam answers. Some high-school teachers tweeted that 20 to 30 percent of their students were in that boat.
On Monday, Zachary Goldberg, a College Board spokesman, elaborated on the organization’s decision not to let such students send time-stamped screenshots of their answers, which some college counselors and testing tutors had urged the organization to do. “Unfortunately, we cannot retroactively allow email submissions due to widespread social-media chatter among students about ways to change their timestamps,” Goldberg wrote in an email. “While we know that most students would demonstrate integrity and not improve their responses in the time since the testing ended, others sadly could.”
But the addition of the backup email-submission process on the sixth day of testing begs a question: Why wasn’t it in place on the very first day?
It isn’t clear whether the College Board considered such a policy prior to testing, and, if so, why students weren’t given the option to begin with. In an email on Monday, Goldberg wrote that test takers had the option to take a makeup exam from Day 1: “After hearing students’ feedback over the past week, we worked to implement the email-submission safeguard for students who encounter submission issues this week or during the makeup period.”
Students who couldn’t submit answers during the first week of exams had the option of requesting a makeup test in June. “These students can feel confident that the backup email-submission option will be in place for them during their makeup exam,” a College Board announcement said.
Those who are unable — or unwilling — to retake a test would receive a full refund for it, the College Board announced on Sunday. Ditto for those beset by technical problems during the makeup exam.
Several parents on Monday told The Chronicle that they were frustrated that students affected by last week’s glitches had no option but to retake the test. “I’m not sure if my son will retake the exams,” one mother wrote in an email. “He’s busy now catching up on work that was shoved aside for AP studying.”
Others complained that the backup option was introduced only after half of the Advanced Placement tests had been taken.
Wendela Shannon, whose daughter, Bryn, was unable to submit both pages of her responses to the first question on the Calculus BC exam, shared her sarcastic interpretation of the organization’s announcement. “Thank you, Week 1 test takers for being our guinea pigs, and pointing out our shortcomings,” she wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “Because we screwed up, and you pointed it out, future test takers will benefit! And for being our beta testers, you will be rewarded with the opportunity to retest! Of course we cannot allow you to submit your time-stamped work that OUR SYSTEM prevented you from uploading the first time you took the exam, because we know that all students (and some rich parents) cheat.”
Shannon said she had contacted Robert Feitel, the father of another student who wasn’t able to submit her answers to an Advanced Placement exam last week. Feitel, a lawyer in the Washington, D.C., area, told the Washington Post that he “will sue if he has to.”
“I am hoping he’d consider a class action,” Shannon said. “Doubt it will go anywhere, but that’s how mad I am. I am not going to let this die.”
As other angry parents took to social media to discuss possible lawsuits against the College Board on Monday, college counselors who work with low-income students were thinking about how the recent glitches might affect the most vulnerable test takers.
Alicia Oglesby, director of school and college counseling at Bishop McNamara High School, in Maryland, knew of eight students — of about 80 who took Advanced Placement exams last week — who weren’t able to submit their responses.
“Some of our ninth graders are, out of the gate, discouraged,” Oglesby said. “That’s frustrating because taking these exams is the type of experience we want them to have so that they can build confidence and skills to combat this impostor syndrome that a lot of them have. It’s just one inconvenience, but it means a lot in the grand scheme of things.”
Like many students and parents, Oglesby said she didn’t understand why the College Board hadn’t built in a workaround for technical problems before this week: “It boggles my mind that there were meetings and collaborations and all sorts of troubleshooting, and, really, nobody saw that should the system not work, there should be a backup way for students to submit their answers? I mean, really, nobody thought of that?”
