AP rule change lacks effectiveness

It sometimes seems that there is no entity more ubiquitous in the lives of students than the College Board, the giant that runs the SAT, SAT subject tests and AP exams. Now, in a surprising rule change effective this year, the College Board is trying to prevent the inevitable.

The rule regarding the discussion of AP test questions has changed so that students may only discuss the specific AP free-response questions (FRQs) that have been released online on the College Board website. The College Board claims that this change has occurred because some questions will be reused in future years and they don’t want future AP test takers to have an upper hand.

In previous years, all of the AP FRQs have been released and free for discussion 48 hours after the test.

High school teachers tell students not to discuss tests; it is cheating. Yet students do it all the time. There are no real benefits to discussing questions after taking a test except to satisfy students’ curiosity as to how well they did.

The College Board has no way of enforcing this rule, and it is almost guaranteed that it will be broken. Most students can’t stop themselves from discussing test questions and answers. The only change will be that students feel more guilty knowing that they shouldn’t be discussing it.

However, while students are likely to talk about AP tests soon after they have taken them, the discussions are not likely to affect future test takers. The chances that someone will remember the specific questions from an AP test a year later are very small. And why would a student want to give someone else an advantage when they are ultimately going to be compared?

The part of this change that would affect future test-takers is that there will be less material to prepare with on the College Board website. Teachers of AP classes will also have less material available to prepare their students for the AP exams, and even though there are fairly good odds that all of the questions will make it online one way or another, it would still be considered cheating if they discussed it.

If the College Board wants to prevent future AP test takers from having an unexpected advantage, the best strategy would be to create new questions every year. Questions could maybe be reused every 10 years, but variations will keep the test original with questions that students haven’t seen before.