AP Exam Availability for Homeschoolers
As OHS nears the end of the school year, many exciting things are on the horizon for OHS students: graduations, internships, summer jobs, vacations, time with friends, college, gap years. But before any of these thrilling prospects comes May, a month known for many things. For instance, there is spring, flowers, Mother’s Day, Fibromyalgia Awareness, Cinco de Mayo, National Investor’s Month, Memorial Day. For high schoolers, May is marked by an additional event: AP exams.
These fateful exams are an important part of many high schooler’s academic careers. They provide an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge and mastery over a subject, collect college credit at some institutions, show academic rigor, apply to the UK universities (which equate the exams with A-levels), and qualify for scholarships. AP exams play an especially important role for homeschooled students, who need them to show progress and prove measurement of learning on their transcripts. A standardized test in a proctored environment is often the only way to prove true, independent proficiency. The problem is, for homeschooled students, taking these AP exams can prove impossible.
While many at OHS do not identify as homeschooled, our student body still has a population of part-time and single-course students who do. Even many full-time OHS students who register within their state as homeschooled bear all the unintended consequences and biases directed toward those not attending a brick-and-mortar.
The College Board advises homeschooled students to seek out seats for the AP exams at local high schools, both public and private. Nevertheless, many schools will not allow this nor accommodate these students, having instituted policies for “receiving requests from outside students” that bar homeschoolers from sitting for AP exams.
Last year, none of the local public high schools in my town or my grandparent’s town would permit me to take the exams I requested. In my own town in Rhode Island, the local public high school received 37 million dollars worth of funding in 2019, and only around ten percent of that was state aid. This means the vast majority of the funding is from property taxes–taxes that homeschooled families like mine pay, yet the schools still deny their students test seats. According to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, on average, 36 percent of local revenue for public schools comes from property taxes.
If taxes from homeschooling households contribute to their local school district like any other brick-and-mortar family, why are homeschool students discriminated against, like clockwork, every fall when they go to register for AP exams? If a homeschooled student lives within the district of a school, they are as entitled to a seat as any given student who happens to attend. They should be permitted to pay the College Board for the test and sit for AP exams, regardless of attendance status.
When a local public school refuses, arranging AP exams becomes a monumental task. It involves reaching out to dozens of local high schools, scrounging through faculty pages and waiting on hold to find the AP coordinator (if there is one), preparing with said AP coordinator outside of the normal automated portals to ensure a seat, and then, come May, at least for me, driving hours to reach the testing center.
After contacting more than a dozen schools to register for AP exams last year, the only one that would offer me a seat to take three tests was two states away. This is especially problematic for morning exams, which all begin at 8AM and require students to arrive at 7:30AM. A few hours extra in the car on exam morning deprives students of impactful sleep, which has been shown time and time again to hurt test performance. My AP Lit and Lang exams last year started at eight in the morning and my family had to drive me nearly three hours to reach them. I yawned through the multiple choice sections.
If students don’t want to rise at the crack of dawn and instead choose to find lodging closer, there’s also the added cost of a motel, in addition to gas or third party transportation for parents who work full-time. The College Board offers AP exams on weekdays, after all. AP exams also cost money – $100 each. For a homeschool student eager to demonstrate proficiency in a given subject, this situation can quickly become expensive. AP exams end up costing more for many homeschooled students, another consequence of these biased policies.
The College Board needs to create a standardized system which allows homeschoolers to find AP seating: a database of schools with a list of updated contacts, a way to easily register that doesn’t require direct communication with a coordinator, readily available directions for where to park and enter, how to find the testing classrooms so students don’t require a chaperone.
But for now, homeschoolers should continue to contact local high schools, point out their district residency and remind the schools that they are property-tax-paying families. In the case of denials, families may reach out to the head of your school district, state education officers, or the Home School Legal Defense Association.
In the case of publicly funded high schools, this request is not only a question of rights, but a question of civility, the willingness to provide help and extend generosity to students who find themselves, for whatever reason, in more unusual situations.
Although a Washington Post analysis reports the number of homeschoolers grows every year, they are still the vast minority (around 6 percent of students) in the United States according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The attitude of public schools should not be to shut their doors to what and whom they deem “other” but rather to exercise reason and civility, and strive towards inclusion.