MILWAUKEE (SPECTRUM NEWS) -- The month of May usually means one thing for high school students: exam time. This semester, however, comes with a twist. Everything is now online—including Advanced Placement (AP) exams for college credit.
But with things moving to a new online format, glitches have prevented many students from submitting their answers.
"I was just really panicked and I didn't really know what to do," Evan Sina, an AP student, said.
Sina was one of many that ran into problems uploading answers. After he finished the first problem on his AP calculus exam, Evan has seven minutes to submit his work. He used the scanner app on his phone, saved the file to his computer, and that's when things went downhill.
"I felt terrible for him because you know, they work so hard, studying and cramming," Sara Sina, Evan's mom, said. "He couldn't find the file and I couldn't really help him from work."
Sara later figured out scanning Evan's answer turned the file into a PDF, which is deemed an unacceptable file type for submissions.
"Their file upload is only looking for acceptable types which are JPGs and things like that," Sara said.
"All of my teachers that I do assignments for, they recommend using the scanner so I just kind of assumed it was the same thing," Evan said.
Sara told Spectrum News 1 there were other "error messages" that came up during the process—something that was also reported by other students.
According to the College Board, which owns the tests, 3.5 million students took an AP exam in the first week and a half of testing. It claims less than 1% of students had issues in the first few days.
But according to a federal lawsuit filed this week in California, there are reports of anywhere between 5%-20% of examinees not able to submit responses during the first week of AP exams.
After all the complaints, the College Board did make a change, offering a back-up option to submit answers by email.
But for the students like Evan, who took their AP exam in the first round of testing, the only option is to retake it in June.
"I'm bummed that I have to do it again because I did a lot of studying up until that," Evan said. "Now I have to kind of relearn a bunch of things that I was kind of shaky on."
"For him to not complete it that first day and get it over with was disappointing," Sara said.