It is officially AP exam season at Wilsonville High School, and it has been a stressful one. With two weeks of testing and two tests per day, there is a lot that can go wrong during that time. Sleeping in, missing an AM test time, not bringing your calculator, and losing your sticker sheet are all problems that occur during testing season.

But this year, one major problem that affected many students was the afternoon of May 10th, when The College Board website crashed. Students were unable to access any information from the website, and they couldn’t use any of the resources available to them to prepare for their tests. 

But on an even more catastrophic level, all of the AP art students weren’t able to work on and submit their portfolios. The students who were submitting their portfolios discovered that right after lunch, the website had crashed, and it wasn’t up and running again until about 2:50 p.m., which meant that they had lost almost three hours of work time.

Since the website did end up working again very close to the end of the school day, the students who were done with their portfolios were able to submit just before the bell rang. However, the students who needed to use those 3 hours to finish putting in the photos to the digital portfolio were unable to submit them before the deadline.

Thankfully, the wonderful AP coordinator at WHS, Tate Olsen, was able to get a deadline extension for the artists. Many of the students who missed the original deadline were able to complete and submit their portfolios at the beginning of the following week with no issues.

AP 2D art student Kaia Christian says that the whole situation was “so frustrating because I knew there was absolutely nothing I could do to fix it.” Then multiple students agreed that “all I could do was wait it out and hope for the best.” the positive attitudes most students had made it possible to get everything done in the end.