In today’s digital age, seemingly everything we do has gone online. From reading books, to playing games, to checking what the homework was, activities that had traditionally been in the real world are increasingly moving to an online platform.

In many of these instances, the move online has proven to be the right decision, as it often creates a user system which is more efficient and user-friendly. Take Blackboard for instance, which students can use to check their homework on the computer. In the past, if students had to miss school, or was unsure about their assignments for a class, they had to undergo a complicated process which involved calling multiple friends and waiting for emails from teachers that may never come. Enter Blackboard: an online tool which allows teachers to keep students updated on upcoming assignments, share class materials digitally, and provide various learning materials which could only be available on the Web. The response to Blackboard was universally positive – and justifiably so. Its diverse and accessible tools revolutionized the way students and their teachers were able to stay in touch.

Yet while the successes of Blackboard and other online programs have highlighted the potential of digitally-based learning materials, there are still portions of the curriculum which completely exclude these benefits.

Case in point: large end of year exams.

When it comes to the most significant and stressful assignments of the year, the education boards are sacrificing one of the most significant advances they’ve made to help their students.

Take the AP exams – one of the most stressful assessments of the year, but also one of the few which tasks students of doing everything by hand. Especially when dealing with such a complicated and lengthy procedure as an AP exam, the challenges of a physical, pen-and-paper approach present themselves quite flagrantly.

First of all, AP tests are extremely long, and it is very difficult for a student to complete a lengthy handwritten exam when they are so far used to doing things by computer. This is especially an issue when it comes to the written portion which is included in many AP exams, as tasking a student with writing multiple lengthy and discursive essays is a challenge all on its own, and it is only exacerbated when a student has to create the writing from a medium they have little practice in.

Furthermore, the constant handwriting involved with these exams can wear down on students, and potentially reduce the quality of their work. It’s not all that uncommon for students to take multiple of these exams in a single day, and by the time they get to handwriting their 5th and 6th essays of the day, their exhausted minds and cramped hands are nowhere near capable of performing at their highest level. Such circumstances make the testing situation unfair for these students – an injustice whose only cure could be to move the testing online.

In addition, computerizing these essays would make the grading exponentially easier, and possibly even more fair. Grading countless essays is taxing work, and as the College Board readers work to decipher the handwriting of the student-authors, their patience begins to wear thin. Just as the acuity of students begins to falter as they work on their final essays, so does the critical eye of exam graders as they work on reviewing their 200th exam of the day. By moving this process online, however, the College Board could read the essays without the distractions and ambiguity of bad handwriting, leading to essays which are graded more quickly and fairly.

Even the multiple choice section would see benefits from a faster benefit, particularly in the speed of its grading. Although the advent of the Scantron has vastly sped up the grading of long multiple choice exams, a move online would only expedite the process even further. If perfected, such a system could even show a student their score as soon as they finish the exam – an option which could certainly not be afforded in the current pen-and-paper format.

While they do serve as a significant example, AP exams are not the only assessment which would serve to benefit from being moved online. Nearly any assessment would see improvement following a digital shift, ranging from end-of-year finals to bi-quarterly vocabulary quizzes. Aside from normal exams, though, another test which serves as an especially important candidate for an online shift is the test familiar with probably any student to have pondered going to college: the SAT.

Taken by over two million students every year, the SAT exam is the most widely-taken test in America. Yet it is still one of the major assessments to avoid the shift to an online platform.

Whilst it would maintain many of the same advantages as online AP exams, the scope of the SAT’s new medium would be significantly greater.

This is particularly true when it comes to the scoring of the exams. Given that so many students take it every year, and that its multiple-choice sections are so lengthy, the current Scantron grading method is horribly inefficient. Not only does the out-of-date grading method take relative eons to score students’ exams (while wasting countless reams of paper in the process), the manual grading of these texts can even make the submission of test results risky.

As recently as this last spring, local schools have had delivery malfunctions that jeopardized the test scores of their students. For some 100 Falls Church High School students who take the SAT last April, their entire scores almost risked being cancelled due to a mistake in the shipping of their answer sheets. Fortunately, the post office managed to locate the scores, which had gone missing in the system. However, the potential for disaster was sky-high, as an entire batch of students risked having to retake the biggest exams of their lives.

Imagine taking a huge test, for which many students devote countless hours of studying and often hundreds of dollars’ worth of tutoring, only to have their scores thrown away because the post office misplaced some paperwork.

By moving the tests online, this nightmare which could be easily avoided, and benefits which could never be matched in the current format would be provided.

As the world moves forward into the digital era, the room for paper-based testing is squeezing tighter by the minute. These dinosaurs – relics of another technological era – are bound to go extinct, and the sooner we can facilitate that will mean the sooner students can reap the benefits of an online system. Although they may have been around for as long as we can remember, it seems as though these pen-and-paper exams are going to fail the test of time.