Psych out College Board keeps apologizing for screwing up digital SAT and AP tests AP Psych is the latest casualty of digital snafus. Nate Anderson – May 23, 2025 3:54 pm | 10 Credit: Getty Images Credit: Getty Images Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Don't worry about the "mission-driven not-for-profit" College Board—it's drowning in cash. The US group, which administers the SAT and AP tests to college-bound students, paid its CEO $2.38 million in total compensation in 2023 (the most recent year data is available). The senior VP in charge of AP programs made $694,662 in total compensation, while the senior VP for Technology Strategy made $765,267 in total compensation. Given such eye-popping numbers, one would have expected the College Board's transition to digital exams to go smoothly, but it continues to have issues. Just last week, the group's AP Psychology exam was disrupted nationally when the required "Bluebook" testing app couldn't be accessed by many students. Because the College Board shifted to digital-only exams for 28 of its 36 AP courses beginning this year, no paper-based backup options were available. The only "solution" was to wait quietly in a freezing gymnasium, surrounded by a hundred other stressed-out students, to see if College Board could get its digital act together. I speak, as you may have gathered, from family experience; one of my kids got to experience the incident first-hand. I was first clued into the problem by an e-mail from my school, which announced "a nationwide Bluebook outage (the testing application used for all digital AP exams)" for all AP Psych testers. Within an hour, many students were finally able to log in and begin the test, but other students had scheduling conflicts and were therefore "dismissed from the testing room" and given slots during the "late test day" or "during the exception testing window." On Reddit, the r/APStudents board melted down in predictable fashion. One post asked the question on everyone's mind: HOW DO U NOT PREPARE THE SERVERS FOR THE EXAM WHEN U KNOW WE'RE TAKING THE EXAM HELLO?????? BE SO FR i was locked in and studied like hell for this ap psych exam ts pmo like what the actual f---nugget??? Now, I'm old enough not to know what "BE SO FR," "TS," or "PMO" mean, but the term "f---nugget" comes through loud and clear, and I plan to add it to my vocabulary. Other students, whose schools canceled the exam before access was restored, raged against having to gear up for the test again in the future. "I CANT BELIEVE THEY DELAYED IT," wrote one. "I STUDIED FOR THR PAST WEEK EIGHT HOURS EVERYDAY AND RUINED MY SOCIAL LIFE FOR THIS. WHAT THE FREAK." Of course, there's always a silver lining to a cloudy day, and some less-prepared students—who had not apparently ruined their social lives for the past week—celebrated the delay. "i studied for like 12 hrs the day before no f---ing joke," wrote one, "and ngl [not gonna lie] idek [i don't even know] what psychoanal or biosycosocial model is or anything so its a win for me." College Board issued a statement on the day of the AP Psych exam, copping to "an issue that prevented [students] from logging into the College Board’s Bluebook testing application and beginning their exams at the assigned local start time." Stressing that "most students have had a successful testing experience, with more than 5 million exams being successfully submitted thus far," College Board nonetheless did "regret that their testing period was disrupted." It's not the first such disruption, though. Deeply and sincerely apologize This year's move to all-digital AP testing for most subjects is the latest move in a process that began several years back, and it still has numerous wrinkles. Not all of these are the fault of the College Board, either, but asking millions of students and educators to use a complex set of tools—including Chromebooks, school Wi-Fi networks, the Internet, and the College Board's own app infrastructure—imposes a new and more complex set of technical challenges than the older paper exams. For instance, this year's AP Stats exam was also disrupted at my school district, though this appears to have been an issue related to local Wi-Fi access. And when my eldest took the (also digital, also Bluebook) SAT exam at another school district last year, that district, too, had its own tech issues as students from other districts had trouble getting onto the school network. College Board also continues to have problems delivering digital testing at scale in a high-pressure environment. During the SAT exam sessions on March 8–9, 2025, more than 250,000 students sat for the test—and some found that their tests were automatically submitted before the testing time ended. College Board blamed the problem on "an incorrectly configured security setting on Bluebook." The problem affected nearly 10,000 students, and several thousand more "may have lost some testing time if they were asked by their room monitor to reboot their devices during the test to fix and prevent the auto-submit error." College Board did "deeply and sincerely apologize to the students who were not able to complete their tests, or had their test time interrupted, for the difficulty and frustration this has caused them and their families." It offered refunds, plus a free future SAT testing voucher. Switching to digital has many benefits, including higher security and easier grading, but organizations routinely appear to underestimate how difficult it is to run complex digital infrastructure at scale, especially under time pressures. The fact that College Board has had significant errors this year alone in both of its flagship testing regimes is not the sort of thing students want to hear. Nor do parents, for that matter, who can easily rack up $1,000-plus College Board fees per student (8–10 AP courses across their high school years at $99 per test, plus two SAT exams at $68 apiece). And the irritation only grows when the money goes to massive executive salaries while the core exams continue to have problems. Nate Anderson Deputy Editor Nate Anderson Deputy Editor Nate is the deputy editor at Ars Technica. His most recent book is In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World, which is much funnier than it sounds. 10 Comments