College Board Makes Big Change to AP Test Registration Deadlines

The College Board has made significant changes to AP registration deadlines – find out how these will impact you in the coming year. https://www.collegeconfidential.com/articles/college-board-makes-big-change-to-ap-test-registration-deadlines/

Screwing over middle class parents yet again. Kids with wealthy parents won’t care about a couple hundred bucks, kids with poor parents get waivers.

Agreed @ninakatarina Adding that seniors will now have to decide in November which tests they are going to take without knowing where they are going to college yet…resulting in greater revenues for CollegeBoard because seniors will want to keep open the possibility of potentially getting college credit and/or advanced placement. A $40 cancellation fee is also ridiculous.

Yup. Just another money grab by the CB, IMO, with no benefit at all to the cohort to whom they are supposed to be catering.

“The reasoning is that if a student in an AP course already knows by November that he or she will be taking the associated exam in May, the student will be more attentive to the course material because there is a concrete goal ahead – a goal that is shared by all or most students enrolled in that course.”

Are AP exams really that much more effective as a motivator? Pretty sure kids are clued in to the fact that submitting AP grades to colleges is optional, but submitting a transcript is not.

Yeah, I call BS on that reasoning. It’s all about the benjamins.

My high school was among those testing the new deadline. (I think I may have posted about it here.) I can tell you that CB got more money from us than they would have if we were registering this month.

Pre changes:
Kiddo #1 Junior year - waited until March to decide whether she would register for the test in all her classes. Decided not to register for the one she was least interested in.
Kiddo #1 Senior year - in March we knew future college was one of two universities. Looked up policies and made decision not to take one exam because it was no additional credit compared to an exam she’d taken junior year.

Post changes:
Kiddo #2 Senior year - registers for all AP exams in November because we have no idea where he’ll be going to school and he can’t prioritize which exams are most important at this point.

They’re a money grab. Pure and simple.

My school was also part of the pilot program. My district also requires students to take all of the AP exams for classes they’re in, except Physics C E&M. So switching to the earlier deadline didn’t change anything. (To be honest, I completely forgot that most people sign up for AP exams in March.)

Obviously if the HS requires that the AP tests be taken, then the student has no choice, and the change of dates doesn’t matter. For everybody else, though…

We have block scheduling. So I guess now 2 months before the first day of class we have to decide on some of our tests. If this was in place for my senior I would have paid for a test for a class he ended up switching out of at the last minute before it even started.

If our district lets us just sign up late and pay the late fee, that’s probably what we will end up doing. I have a feeling it may be cheaper for me in the long run.

The only potential positive would be if our school starts teaching more to the test (I threw up a bit in my mouth when I said that, but in this case with a high stakes test at the end it is probably true). I think in many of our classes most students don’t take the tests right now, so the teachers just treat it as an advanced class not necessarily one with an AP test at the end.

It’s hard to see this as anything short of a pure money grab.

Sometimes the teachers at our school recommend that a student not take the AP – if they think the student is not prepared.

My kid’s high school is also on a block schedule…and nothing’s set in stone until classes start. It’s bad enough that our kids who take an AP class in Spring semester have to wait till May to take the test, but now we’ll be expected to pay for the test without being certain which classes they’ll actually end up in.

The CB will end up making a fortune on kids who pay for the test ‘just in case’ it’s transferable but then end up not even taking it because by the time it rolls around they’re committed to a school that won’t accept the credit. What a scam.

I wish the schools would push back on this.