This year, the College Board made the decision of making 28 of the 2025 AP exams fully digital, and the rest of the exams hybrid digital. The college board site explained that this decision was so that they could “ensure the security of the AP Exams” but this new format proved to be a challenge for many students across the country, and in our very own school. 

For many of the STEM-related AP exams such as AP Chemistry, AP Statistics and AP Physics, there are required equation sheets that are provided for students to use to solve a range of problems. After the AP Chemistry and AP Stats exam, however, many students expressed frustration with the low quality formula sheet that was integrated into the Bluebook testing app.

Senior Jackie Kuang took the AP Stats exam and felt frustrated with the formula sheet, saying, “The UI [user interface] was so bad because the screens on the chromebooks are pretty small in general, but when you open the formula sheet it’s not properly sized because it’s not meant to take up your entire screen. This meant that the equations were all super squished. For the tables, they were also really hard to read because to find the Z scores and t star values, you would have to go and cross between the axis, but since those are at the end of the table, it was pretty difficult to use.” 

For junior Sasa Pancoast, her chromebook crashed in the middle of the AP U.S. History exam, which meant that she had to retake the exam during the late testing period a week later from the original exam date. She said,“My chromebook was working great through all the MCQs and SAQs, but through the FRQ, I was over halfway through and it just completely shut down. When they got me a new one, it was just a blank screen … I had the option to redo them by hand or take the entire AP test again next week. I got an extra week for studying, but at that point I wanted to be done with my APs.”

Despite the number of complaints about the digital formula sheet, Kuang felt that there weren’t many other issues with the new digital exams. “For physics at least, I think they were given a paper formula sheet which I think satisfied a lot of the student complaints,” he said. “There was a lot of backlash online on how bad they were. Aside from the formula sheets, I don’t think the digital AP test was that different. It also helps that we didn’t have to spend so long filling out the scantron part.”