Advanced Placement Test Results

Resolved: The College Board should post the results of Advanced Placement (AP) tests online for students with College Board accounts to access as soon as the scores are available. Introduction: Advanced Placement tests are relatively brief examples on specific topics that are administered to high school students for college credit and placement. These tests are typically administered in May and are scored by the end of June. They are scored on a scale of 1-5; a 3 is considered to be passing but many universities require scores of 4 or 5. College Board's Policy: The College Board mails scores to nearly all students by mid July. However, score reports are available by phone starting July 1st. The phone call allows students to find out what their scores were earlier, but the fee is $8. AP scores are never posted online. The College Board's main tests, the SAT and SAT Subject tests, are always posted online for students with College Board accounts approximately two and a half weeks after the exams are administered. My position, as stated about, is that the College Board should post AP results online for the convenience of those who wish to access them without paying the unnecessary fee. My reasons are as follows 1: College Board takes advantage of students' anxiety about these rigorous and significant tests by charging them to receive their scores earlier. It's not rational the pay $8 dollars to find out a score earlier because ultimately it won't affect anything. The main reason people pay the fee is to remove the stress of wondering if they achieved the necessary score. 2. The $8 fee cannot be justified as necessary to maintain the phone service. If this is a problem then College Board should simply do away with the phone service entirely. They already have their website for posting entrance exam scores and it would not cost them any more to post placement exam scores as well. 3. The $8 dollar fee is not necessary to compensate for the cost of administering the test. The AP test is already worth $86, which covers the cost of developing, administering, and scoring the test. The SAT, which is longer than any of the AP tests and is more widely administered, costs only $45 dollars. 4. There is not reason placement test scores cannot be posted online. Universities all over the country, including the Ivy League, accept SAT Subject test scores in foreign language subjects as grounds for placement into more advanced foreign language classes. These scores are already posted online. 5. Graduated seniors needing to schedule classes at their future universities need to know what classes they can place out of. Orientations often occur prior to the release of AP test scores. This can make scheduling first semester freshman classes more confusing and stressful than it already is. Charging for earlier test results or making students wait causes an unnecessary inconvenience for these students. Conclusion: College Board is taking advantage of the anxiety of students about test scores and putting an unnecessary burden on rising university students with it's score policy. To make everyone's lives easier, they should post scores on their website as soon as they are available. The $8 charge is an unnecessary attempt to make extra money off the AP tests. Considering the fact that College Board is a non-profit organization and that they have a monopoly on college placement tests, I see no reason for them to employ this policy. I will bring additional arguments against the policy depending on where my opponent chooses to go with this. Sources: All information about College Board's policies and procedures can be found on their website: http://www.collegeboard.com... Proof that Cornell uses Subject Tests for placement: http://courses.cuinfo.cornell.edu... Unfortunately they did not format the table vary well apparently.