The AP exam season back in May was a much-dreaded time of year amongst us high school students. We hoped with all our hearts that we studied enough. We begrudgingly came to school at 8 am. We sat for three grueling hours taking the exam. And lastly, we waited with bated breath to see if we passed on score release day in July. Well actually, not all of us.
This year, the College Board’s media relations team confirmed that it had to cancel a higher than usual number of AP exam scores. These cancellations were preceded by an influx of emails to high school students across the world, notifying them that their scores are under review for potential academic dishonesty. This triggered a wave of panic across multiple social media platforms, most notably Reddit and Tiktok. In the week leading up to July 8th, students frantically analyzed the email domain in hopes that it’s just a scam and that their college dreams were not under actual jeopardy. However, the students and the world soon realized that it was certainly not a scam, as there’s an international cheating ring at play.
The test material leak that set off this fiasco has been suspected to originate from Chinese social media channels, which then ended up on the international black market. These materials reached an unprecedented number of students as part of a global cash-for-questions operation. How did they even get access to the question materials, you may ask? Well, while the College Board is known for its dedication to test-taking security by making students remove all electronic devices from their person and sign oaths promising to not discuss the test content, they can hardly see to those rules being followed.
You see, there are many “test pirate” rings, which are sophisticated organizations that leak materials illegally for a profit, and they have many tricks up their sleeve for doing so. In rare cases, these rings will have ties to the inside, having test writers and proctors funnel answer sheets directly to them. Advanced technologies are employed on other occasions, where a ‘mole’ is sent to take the test with high-definition recording tools disguised as innocent pieces of accessories. But the most commonly-used and rarely-detected strategy amongst these pirates is where they send multiple students to take an exam and memorize a predetermined portion of the test, then reassemble the questions to form an entire test. With such a complex arsenal of techniques and unending demand from immoral consumers, these rings make up an industry that testing organizations like College Board have to continuously compete with to ensure testing integrity.
Outside of these secretive criminal organizations, individual students have also come up with more and more creative ways to get a leg up during AP testing, oftentimes right under the eyelids of their proctors. One such instance is where a girl used her service dog to cheat on her AP Chemistry exam by filling the dog’s raincoat with notes. Shockingly enough, some cheating methods that students have used are a result of the College Board’s own policies. Calculators are common hiding places for formulas and notes about concepts, which is a loophole that many students discovered when they realized that College Board doesn’t require students to clear the memory of their calculators before taking exams. Also, students across the U.S. have taken advantage of College Board’s different testing times across the four time zones to cheat by leaking and receiving exam questions through Tiktok.
In the face of such large-scale and commonplace compromises, the College Board has decided to speed up the digitization process of their AP exams, especially after seeing good results from the adaptable digital SAT that they released this past year. Specifically, 16 AP exams will be administered fully digitally through Bluebook and 12 AP exams will have a hybrid administering process, which will go into effect in May 2025. Mostly the writing-heavy exams such as the histories, English, and Seminar will be completely digitized, while exams that require calculations like the maths and sciences will be hybrid (with multiple-choice questions answered online and free-response questions written on paper). Whether or not this new measure will be effective is unknown as of now, as students and profit-seeking criminals seem to be able to find a way to cheat regardless of the challenges in their way. This begs the question, if students are willing to go to such lengths to get their hands on unauthorized materials, then who’s to tell how much they can achieve if they applied that same fervor to studying using legitimate resources?
Sources:
https://www.ivyscholars.com/the-ap-cheating-scandal-and-the-push-for-digitization/
https://nhpchariotonline.com/802/features/cracks-in-ap-testing-uncovering-recent-cheating-scandals/
