As I noted in the previous post, thousands of students who took AP exams found that their submissions were rejected. The College Board claimed that the fault was in the students’ browsers. It was, of course, blameless.
David Kristofferson–teacher, scientist, IT expert–clarifies the problem. The fault was with the College Board’s overloaded server and bandwidth, not the students’ browsers.
Every students, everywhere in the world, was expected to take the exam at exactly the same time, even in the middle of the night. Everyone was given a five-minute warning before the exam timed out. Every student had a countdown clock in front of them. Almost every one of those students (one million?) hit SEND at the same time.
Kristofferson writes:
One should not blame students for continuing to work a bit longer given these instructions. I heard reports from one of my students who uploaded successfully with 3 minutes left on the timer. Students who went beyond that time point may have encountered increasing difficulties as the system bogged down. This might vary depending upon the number of exam takers on each AP exam.
In fact, students told me that there is a Practice demo that they did try in advance of the actual test.
Undoubtedly, because there was not a load on the system when they tried the demo, they found that the upload went quickly and were lulled into thinking that it would be similar on exam day. That might be naive on their part, but considering that these students were taking a high-stakes abbreviated exam with a countdown timer staring them in the face the entire time, it is easy to understand their motivation to try to gamble at the end. Of course the College Board can say that they were warned as in the block quote above.
Students were warned not to wait until the last minute to submit their answers.
But note once again the imprecision of the warning! Why did the system not tell them on screen to STOP WORK NOW AND UPLOAD IMMEDIATELY OR YOU RISK LOSING ALL CREDIT FOR THIS PROBLEM. ???
Why didn’t the College Board (which gets around $3 billion a year in revenue – it is not a fly-by-night startup with no resources), after initial reports of problems last week, add more server and network bandwidth capacity??
This is an example of what happens when the American public education system is turned into a high-stakes testing system like the Chinese gaokao and other similar national tests in Asia.
Our country made tremendous advances after World War II in educating our citizens, and during that time we put a man on the Moon, began the computer revolution and the Internet; U.S. scientists won numerous Nobel Prizes, and we led the world in R&D and patent applications…
Unfortunately our local high school district and others around the country continue to think that AP is a “high quality curriculum,” when in fact its main purpose is to be purposely difficult and trap-filled to spread out the scoring curve. It fulfills that mission admirably, but this does not mean that AP is an effective learning program. There is no denying that many people think that AP is an essential route to college. However private schools are increasingly dropping this system, and we should too.
I was in high school during the era that preceded high-stakes testing. There was the SAT, but no one practiced for it, no one was tutored. It was a test that students took “cold” because the College Board assured the public that coaching would not change your score (not true, so now we have a major test tutoring industry for the SAT and for AP tests). There were no graduation tests, at least not in the Houston public schools; high school graduation depended on passing the required courses in English, science, mathematics, and social studies.
It is past time for our policymakers to step back and ask bluntly why we subsidize a massive testing industry that determines our children’s futures but is riddled with glitches, errors, and flaws.
Thanks for calling this to people’s attention, Diane.
And I agree completely with your comments about the SAT following the quote from my blog. I never studied for it for precisely the same reasons that you stated and did fine. Sadly I know a lot of parents in my locale who would probably respond that things were “much easier and less competitive in those days.” There is almost a masochistic reveling in making life more difficult and cutthroat now. We will reap what we sow…
This is exactly what our teachers told us in the 80s, the SAT is not a test you study for. The only preparation was a filmstrip (remember “agoraphobia”) which introduced students to the question format.
It’s a College Board brainwidth problem more than anything else.
Exceedingly narrow minds.
AMEN!!!! Could this be posted in every online newspaper please. And let’s talk public school budgets and how the epidemic is causing money issues. All these parents think that that the AP courses in HS are free. They are NOT free. The AP curriculum is PURCHASED from the College Board using education TAX DOLLARS. Teachers must be “trained” to teach each course which also costs money. The more AP classes offered in a school system, the more tax payer money is used to purchase the “product”. If school systems wish to cut costs, AP is the perfect cost saving method. Sorry, but I will never think highly of the tests (even though I have a child who scored very well on them because she wanted to take them), or the curriculum. The whole scheme of it is to make money for the College Board by setting up cut throat competition among children (via their helicopter parents). Let ALL the children learn by providing well rounded curriculum written by teachers and scrap the bunk of AP.
and cutting ALL standardized testing, all testing personnel, all testing trainings and all testing curricula would make essential sense before making any cuts to a school’s course offerings and teaching staff
I just received this note from a parent a few minutes ago:
Looks like emailing if you get get an upload error message is now an option. Message from the College Board today.
Submitting Exam Responses
Beginning Monday, May 18, and continuing through the makeup window, if your student is unable to upload their response due to a technical disruption, they’ll be able to email it to us immediately following the conclusion of their browser-based exam. If this happens during their exam, they will follow instructions on how to email their response on the page that says, “We Did Not Receive Your Response.” The email address that appears on this page will be unique to each student.
Hi David — a reporter co-worker would like to speak to that parent, since we haven’t heard this from anyone else. You could email me at cgrannan@gmail.com if you can/are willing to make the connection. Thanks!
I’ve passed your note on to the parent.
Carolinesf – I was about to enter the grocery store when I saw your request and answered quickly before I did so. I should add now that I have more time that I know the source of that information personally. She lives in my neighborhood and has students in school. I have no reason to doubt her, and she should have no reason to make this up.
I just went to CB’s website and the news is here:
https://apcoronavirusupdates.collegeboard.org/students/taking-ap-exams/exam-day-experience/submission-guidelines/back-up-email
It’s all over the boards. Many teachers got the same email.
BUT, the kids who took tests in week 1 CANNOT do the same. They have to take the make up test.
If the make up test doesn’t work for a kid, College Board will STILL charge that kid for the test, even if it isn’t the kid’s fault that the test wouldn’t upload.
It boggles the mind that there is no contingency, no backups in place to deal with a situation like this, a situation that we all knew was coming. Anyone who is currently dealing with distance learning at home knows the technology flaws and glitches all too well. Not surprising that the College Board is trying to excuse itself of any and all blame for the problem and is hiding behind percentages of students who were not able to submit their exam. There are real people behind those percentages. It’s the Hunger Games of test-taking, may the best internet win. Shameful…
Great work, David!!! I am quite impressed.
Thank you, Bob!
I thought Bob was being sarcastic about Coleman.
You might be right, Duane! I thought that he was complimenting my article 😳…
Two birds with one stone!
PS – College Board just announced an email work around in case you missed a comment I just posted earlier above. This is clearly a tacit admission on their part.
I saw that. They got the message. LOL. Their Facebook page looked as though the mob was grabbing their shovels and pitchforks and machetes.
I’m sure they will manage to mess that up too.
Ok, it would have been nice if the the geniuses at the College Board had put their collective heads together and thought of that before all the chaos ensued…
Yep. Especially since this new workaround will NOT help the kids who encountered problems last week while the College Board dithered. They will have to take the retake, and if they can’t get into the retake either, College Board will STILL charge them for the test.
I really hope someone files a class action lawsuit against CB. The stress the kids go through for the exam not to be accepted and then have to retake at a later time. Then to blame the students. They should be held accountable for this debacle.
The College Board has been active in making sure a bunch of AP courses and subjects served by Pre-AP courses are part of a de facto national curriculum to be complied with and tracked in the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC).
If anyone was paying attention, this would be considered an illegal action by the CRDC, a branch of the Department of Education and prohibited by law from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control “over the curriculum or program of instruction in public schools,” a law most recently affirmed by The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (20 U.S.C. 7907(a)).
This is not the time or occasion to look at that issue, but the College Board has been allowed to define curriculum categories in the CRDC since 1992, and there can be no doubt that it has been a major player in sustaining the damaging culture of testing in our schools, especially middle and high schools.
The College Board is a money-making machine. It plays with the hopes of students for a lower cost collegiate education if they take and pass “rigorous” AP courses in high school. The AP money machine is aided and abetted by rating schemes like those in US News and World Report and at GreatSchools.org where the more AP courses offered the higher rating of the school.
The Catch 22 comes now with ESSA that requires schools to report on the per-pupil costs of education at the school level. This matters because research that shows AP courses are more expensive others and could be cut or taken in non-school settings (for a fee). That research is from the federal watchdog for this facet of ESSA, Dr. Marguerite Roza of the Edunomics Lab, Georgetown University. The pandemic is adding more reasons for AP to migrate into on-line only courses and with extra fees for the instruction now provided in public schools.
About 1/3 of my Physics C kids were unable to submit their work, for both the Mechanics and E&M exams (Monday, the very first exams.) Kids submitted their documents with 1, 3, 5, even 8 minutes to go…and various problems occurred. Some of their graphics files simply wouldn’t upload, even after repeated attempts. Others would upload and give a preview that was completely blacked out. One kid had his first page upload and his second fail to.
A total mess.
Although the US govenrmnet and English Lit exams flowed much more smoothly (the kids simply had to type into an editing box), Tuesday’s calculus exam and Thursday’s Chemistry exam had the same problems as physics.
Whatever your take on the validity/importance/need for APs, this showing is utterly ridiculous and a reflection on the College Board’s incompetence. Reminds me of the Pokemon cell phone game’s attempt to have many thousands of fanatics rally in Chicago…
…who would have thought their collective cell phones would overwhelm the region’s communications systems?
Idiots…
Human Geography was a catastrophe on Tuesday afternoon, and the AP blames calculus students for causing the problem, so yeah…
No surprise there.
Calculus students are the source of pretty much ALL the problems in the world.
DAM Isaac Newton and DAm apples.😀
TARGO!!!
This is a job for…Jean Claude Brizzard!!! (You know, the former Supt. of Rochester, NY Public schools, widely disliked, then promoted to Supt. of CPS, which he left so as not to be a “distraction,” then ended up at…the College Board {wonder what job he’s doing there?!})
JC might be in charge of the AP exams, but that’s just a guess. The College Board sweeps up old “reformers.l
Couldnt agree more with all of this.
Now that this snafu is hopefully under control via email submission (except for the students who had problems last week – we’ll also learn more later today if the fixes work), I’d like to post here some text from near the end of the above article for those who have not had time to read it on my blog. I made some additions to the section that Diane quoted earlier which are included below.
This latest testing problem is only a small part of a much bigger AP mess as readers of this blog know well. I spend most of my time lobbying parents with my articles in the possibly vain hope that they will eventually get fed up and protest. I will turn 67 this year and I fear that the district will simply wait me out…
The original text on my blog contains additional formatting and hyperlink references that are missing below, e.g., the reference to “private schools are increasingly dropping this system.”
Unfortunately our local high school district and others around the country continue to think that AP is a “high quality curriculum,” when in fact its main purpose is to be purposely difficult and trap-filled to spread out the scoring curve. It fulfills that mission admirably, but this does not mean that AP is an effective learning program. There is no denying that many people think that AP is an essential route to college. However private schools are increasingly dropping this system, and we should too.
Please don’t forget that poor countries with large populations had no choice but to ration positions in their colleges, and this is a prime rationale for their national exam systems. I was a Peace Corps teacher in such a country and saw first hand how it worked. Top students identified by the exams were whisked off to elite technical schools while the vast majority were totally confused in school and went on to manual labor jobs. Is that what we want for our country?
In the United States, the College Board thrives mainly because of our tendency to think that “all children are above average,” to quote from A Prairie Home Companion, and want to go to Harvard. Positions at Harvard and other elite schools clearly are a limited resource, but we should not be basing our high school curriculum solely on the needs of the approximately 2000 students who will enter Harvard’s freshman class each year!
In the process of determining who these elite students are, we overwhelm too many students who actually are above average, but do not make it into this elite group. There is absolutely no need to expose those students to the overloaded curriculum and trap-filled test questions that characterize the AP system, and I believe that it actually does them harm in terms of damaging their interest in science and mathematics. I’ve been trying to combat this problem with my own tutoring students for the past 8 years.
The SMUHSD is highly skilled at ignoring my lone voice. I have written over 100 articles on this blog and spoken with district Superintendents and the Board on many occasions, but I can not do this alone.
Parents, it is up to you. They WILL listen if enough of you speak up! Unfortunately, the few people who ever take the time to attend Board meetings are usually advocates for only the top students.
I am an Indian aged 83.
I could well-imagine the students weeping at the last moment when their submissions were rejected for no fault on their part.
The Board has gambled with the students’ future .
As pointed out by Ms Lisa on her email,
your observations are to be published on each and every newspaper