AP online test glitch has teens dismayed

Michele Glazer Jones’ daughter, a junior at San Francisco’s Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, spent months studying for her Advanced Placement calculus exam.

But with the highstakes tests moving online for the first time ever due to the coronavirus pandemic, a widespread technical glitch may have wiped out all her effort.

The exams, which help determine whether students earn college credit for high school coursework, rolled out this week. After the first two days of testing, frustrated teenagers and their parents took to social media to vent about a glitchy system that prevented some students from submitting their finished work — and lack of support from the College Board, the nonprofit organization that administers the exams.

“My daughter was absolutely hysterical,” Jones told The Chronicle, saying the AP website would not accept a digital image of the completed exam before timing her daughter out of the system. When Jones called the College Board, “I sat on hold waiting for them for 45 minutes before (her daughter) said, ‘Don’t bother. I’ll take it again.’ ”

Ava Osborn, a senior at Oakland Tech who took her AP physics test on Tuesday, was also confounded by the online testing system and could not get answers when her completed test failed to process correctly.

“We spent two hours on hold with the College Board, and the woman on the phone basically said she couldn’t help me,” Osborn said. “I still haven’t been able to file for the makeup test.”

The College Board said on Tuesday that approximately 1% of the more than 1 million students who took the exams, given in 38 subjects, encountered technical difficulties.

That’s roughly 10,000 kids who prepared, paid $94 each and sat through the 45minute online program.

The company said it will let students make up the exams in June if they have technical difficulties. Its website states that how and when a school collects and refunds fees from students remains a schoollevel decision.

Jones said she doesn’t believe the 1% number is accurate.

“There’s absolutely no way they could know how many people had problems,” she said.

“It’s a blind statement from them that shows they have no empathy for the kids who worked so hard to take these tests.”

The College Board did not respond to The Chronicle’s requests for further comment.

California students will take nearly 500,000 AP tests this spring.

The testing snafu is the latest frustration for teens who haven’t been in a classroom for two months. With learning limited to online assignments and video calls with teachers, they are now taking the nerveracking AP exams at home and hoping there are no technical issues to add another layer of worry.

“There’s been a lot of studying and trying to keep up,” said Jacob Tabibian, a junior at Campolindo High School in Moraga who was able to submit only half of his finished exam before the website shut him out. “It’s really frustrating.”

These exams are typically proctored and conducted in person, and last three hours. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s AP exams are being administered as doityourself online tests requiring students to write essays on a computer or phone and upload them for submission. In some cases, students write their answers by hand and then submit a photo of their work.

Many students reported getting an error message when reaching that final step.

“I think this year’s tests are completely inequitable,” Osborn said. “This year’s system is unfair to students without the right resources to take the test. The College Board is not taking those concerns seriously.”

A Twitter post on Wednesday from the company’s official account said, “While more than 99% of students successfully submitted their AP exam responses today, some who didn’t told us they had trouble cutting and pasting their responses. We took a closer look and found that outdated browsers were a primary cause of these challenges.”

It advised that people who had issues submitting their exams update their browsers to the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Microsoft Edge.

The College Board also posted a link to a new troubleshooting page.

An earlier Tweet from the organization suggested that the problem had to do with the interface not accepting the default format of iPhone photos and that images would have to be converted to the widely used digital format known as a jpeg.

The messaging did not sit well with the Twitter account’s followers who, in the replies thread, accused the College Board of “blaming the students” and said, “This is disappointing.”

The technical problems affected students across the country.

Mahima Karanth, a sophomore at Ward Melville High School in Long Island, N.Y., told The Chronicle she experienced the same issues during her AP calculus exam on Tuesday. After she submitted her work, she reached a page that said, “Sorry, we haven’t received your response.”

“I was so irritated because all of the students’ hard work was ignored and affected by something completely out of their control,” Karanth said. “How would students know if the same thing wouldn’t occur in June? The College Board’s lack of concern for their students is unacceptable.”

In San Francisco, Jones’ daughter is scheduled to take six AP tests in total. This was her first one.

“I think this is a complete fail,” Jones said. “Unfortunately, the ones who suffered from this are the kids.”