What I Learned From a Fatal Error on the US History AP Exam

I accidentally submitted the wrong document when submitting my online AP US History exam. I realized a few minutes after, absolutely devastated, thinking that I had made such a stupid mistake.

Later, after discussing with my mother, I realized that perhaps I wasn’t the only one to blame. There was no preview on the submission page.  If there had been a file preview on the exam itself, I would have been more cautious and looked at exactly what I uploaded instead of hitting Submit. Although the file name was definitely different (I uploaded a practice I had done for that exam the day before), the file names were small on the page and I missed the difference.

There was another reason — and that was my mindset. Yesterday I took two other AP exams – Chemistry and Physics 1. For the Chemistry exam, when trying to submit the photos to my last question, the Submit button refused to do anything. I had to open the exam in another tab in order to successfully submit my responses to that question.

This incident with the Chemistry exam made me very worried about submission difficulties. I tried to submit subsequent exams as early as I could in order to avoid the period when everyone else was submitting and when the server was overloaded. This obsession with submission carried over to my US History exam – instead of being cautious and double checking everything upon submission, I hurried and accidentally sent the wrong document, hoping to avoid technical complications.

The exam was one about history, not about file submission.  It should not penalize people for making mistakes during uploading, especially if they are stressed. I fear that I won’t be offered the chance to make up the test, because the upload mistake was my fault, but the reality of whose fault it is much more complex.

According to a usability specialist (who happens to be my mom), many of the errors people make when they use technology are caused by poor interfaces and because designers didn’t take into account the users’ mindsets and needs. Admittedly, the College Board did not have a lot of time to extensively test their AP Exam interface, but they should understand that people are bound to make mistakes, especially under stressful situations, and thus be prepared. The College Board even made exam demos ahead of time — however, it seemed that the main purpose of these demos was for students to get used to the interface when instead it should have been to find common issues and fix them. Students should not have to learn the interface quirks in order to know how to work around them on a real exam.

What are the bigger lessons that I learned from this whole incident? First, sometimes it’s not the person’s fault. I was feeling really stupid after sending out the wrong document, but then I realized that other people are perhaps doing poorly because of suboptimal circumstances as well — everyone is stressed out and is focused on giving a thorough response, not on making sure their internet remains steady, or on figuring out how to use a computer that they might have borrowed.

The second lesson for me as a programmer is that I should always be prepared for people to make errors and to compensate for these errors. People should be able to do their main tasks without interruptions from anything else — the program should not be getting in the way of people’s goals — whatever they want to do. (My goal was to take the history exam and I was focused on that, not on the upload task.) Nobody (except perhaps my mom and her coworkers) is going to praise an app if it works as it should work: people only notice things when they go wrong, and then they will complain. Complaints are almost never invalid. But you don’t really know, as a programmer, what might go wrong, so you have to get people to test your work. The test is not for users to get used to it; it’s for you, so you can fix issues.

Perhaps making strict rules for everything, which is exactly what the College Board does with standardized exams, is not the solution. Strict rules try to generalize the complex reality by splitting different events into discrete categories. However, reality is often much more nuanced and demands human consideration. There is a good reason why most countries today have a judicial system — that is to understand the circumstances of a situation and produce a humane decision. Unfortunately, the same black-and-white thinking is becoming more common in law today. This thinking is present in many prison sentences today — instead of looking for exactly how much of a danger someone who broke a law is to society, these people are classified as criminals and put under one big umbrella.