November 1st is a date in which any Loomis Chaffee student who is planning to take an AP exam will want to have engraved on their calendar. 

Approximately 300 students at Loomis take CL level classes, meaning that Loomis administers between 500 to 600 AP exams each year for students taking anywhere from 1 to 6 exams.  

This year the College Board, the organization that administers the AP program, rolled out a new Fall exam registration policy for AP testing that will impact all students who plan to take exams at the end of the 2019-2020 school year. 

The new policy moves the AP exam registration date to the beginning of November, rather than the previous deadline in March. If students fail to sign up by November 1st, they face a 40 dollar late fee, and an additional 40 dollar cancellation fee applies after registration should they choose not to take the exam.

The change in registration dates is aimed at ultimately helping students have stronger performances on the exams because “The College Board believes that if a student commits to taking the AP in the Fall, they are going to have a better chance of getting a score of 3 or higher since they are making a commitment with themselves and the College Board about preparing for the test” said Standardized Testing Coordinator, Mrs. Virginia DeConinck. 

While the new policy may seem like an abrupt change, the College Board has been preparing for this change for several years and even piloted the program with 40,000 students during the 2017-2018 school year. The results showed that Fall registration increased scores of 3 or higher in all major demographics.

However, the new registration program is not just a change in sign updates, but it is rather an overhaul of the entire AP registration process.

“In the past, we had AP pre-administration where everyone would gather in a room and fill out the bubbles on each answer sheet. The bubbles have gone away; now registration through your College Board account transfers your information to a bar code that students receive for testing” said Mrs. DeConinck. 

Once students sign up for exams, they also receive access to a variety of new resources such as progress checks, practice questions, etc. for students to prepare for the end-of-year exam. And since classes at Loomis are designated as CL, not AP. Teachers often follow a different curriculum than that of the College Board. Therefore, “A lot of students at Loomis have to self-study some if not all of the material for their class’s AP exam and the College Board’s resources are a good way for our students to start preparing now that they have committed to the exam,” said Mrs. DeConinck.    

Teachers of CL classes that match up with a specific AP course were given a join code for their particular subject at the beginning of October, however, as we draw closer and closer to the registration deadline, many teachers have still failed to distribute the join codes to their students. 

Mrs. DeConinck has created a document called “AP registration homework” and hopes that “teachers will let the students know about the attachment and give them the join code.” 

The College Board has made the process simple. The join codes are passed to students by their respective teachers who use the code to register on the College Board website. “It’s just that the teacher has to communicate the join code and the student has to sign up on their cell phone by November,” said Mrs. DeConinck.