The Lawsuit: College Board vs. Students
By PETER MARDJONOVIC
Due to the coronavirus leaving everyone in quarantine, the College Board surveyed over 18,000 students to see if they wanted to have the same opportunity as years before taking the exam. College Board reports that a lot of students agreed on the fact they would like to continue taking the exams from home online, although circumstances this time around were obviously very different
The AP exams were administered online and to access the exam, the College Board had to email an E-ticket to the individual taking the test so that the student can access his/her exam.
However, before the exam even began, students were outraged with how the exams were running. Students who take the tests internationally were outraged at having to wake up between 1 to 4 am. Additionally, many students who received accommodations were outraged and sued the College Board for discriminating against students who are either blind or deaf and could not take their AP exams with the proper accommodations.Nevertheless, the largest issue became students who were unable to submit their AP exams due to problems with the submission.
For instance, from the perspective of a student who chooses to remain anonymous: “The makeup is unfair because it only doubles the stress to studying and raises anxiety when it isn’t even our fault that we could not submit our tests in the first place. The organization {College Board} claims that their tests are fair, but that is a lie because it is unfair how week two students got to email their answers when week one has to retake the tests, even though we should be allowed to resend our work. The College Board should have done something beforehand that way millions of students would not have to go through this.”
As mentioned, the College Board created a system where students could email their tests if they were not able to submit on time. This outrage led a group of teens who could not submit their exams on time to sue the College Board in federal court, demanding that the test maker accept their answers and grade them.
In response to the lawsuit the College Board has stated, “More than 99% of students have successfully submitted their exams and initially said that most technical problems were because those students were not using the latest versions of their internet browsers.”
The College Board states that only 1% of students were unable to submit this work. This translates to 20,000 students and some suspect that the true percentage is somewhere between 5-10% of students due to the outrage on social media platforms such as youtube, twitter, facebook, tik-tok and instagram.
Many wonder what will happen with the future of education depending on which side wins the lawsuit. Some suspect that the College Board will change their AP systems and therefore change their upcoming online ACT and SAT systems to be more fair.