Dive Brief:
- As the 2025 Advanced Placement exam season approaches, students can for the most part do without their No. 2 pencils — College Board is discontinuing standard paper testing for 28 of the 36 AP subjects.
- Last July, the nonprofit behind Advanced Placement courses and the SAT announced that it would transition to a digital format. In May, more than 3 million students are expected to take nearly 6 million fully digital or hybrid digital AP exams, according to a College Board statement.
- AP Language and Culture subjects — Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish — as well as AP Spanish Literature and Culture and AP Music Theory will remain unchanged for 2025 but will transition to digital testing in the future, the release stated.
Dive Insight:
College Board has administered digital AP Exams for select subjects since 2022. In 2024, 650,000 AP Exams were delivered digitally, with more than 75% of students and administrators rating the digital testing experience better or the same as paper testing, according to the company.
The digital switch for AP Exams comes a year after the College Board announced its successful move away from administering paper versions of the SAT college admission exams.
“We’ve found that almost all students who’ve taken a digital AP Exam or participated in an AP digital testing pilot have adapted quickly to the new format,” said Trevor Packer, head of the AP Program, in a statement. “Students today are ‘digital natives’ and appreciate the user-friendly features of the Bluebook interface.”
Bluebook is College Board’s testing application for its digital exams like the SAT. The application supports testing on commonly used devices, whether school-issued or a student's own.
Bluebook works in conjunction with the Test Day Toolkit, which coordinators and staff use to administer the test. The College Board website has resources for educators on topics ranging from how to access the Test Day Toolkit for the first time to how to set up AP exams and a process timeline for before, during and after testing.
AP tests for 16 subjects — including English literature and social sciences — will be fully digital this year while 12 STEM courses will be hybrid digital.
Hybrid digital exams will have two sections: The first is multiple-choice and will be completed through Bluebook, and the second is composed of free-response questions, where students view the prompts in Bluebook and handwrite their answers in paper exam booklets that are returned for scoring.
Other educator resources are available on the AP Educators YouTube channel, including videos on proctoring a fully digital exam and a hybrid digital exam. College Board will also provide schools with loaner devices and Wi-Fi support as needed.
