Every May, high schoolers across the country participate in a collective ritual of sleep deprivation and caffeine abuse known as AP Exam season. We are told these tests are the keys to our future, a chance to prove our mastery of college-level material and save a few thousand dollars in tuition. But as the 2026 testing cycle has shown, when you trap hundreds of stressed students in a silent gym with nothing but a number 2 pencil and the weight of their collegiate future, the results are catastrophic.
The College Board can standardize a curriculum, but it clearly cannot standardize human behavior. This year, the “AP Shenanigans” moved past the typical hidden cheat sheets and into a realm of absurdity that makes a DBQ look easy.
Take the Florida testing center where, during the AP European History exam, 300 cockroaches were released mid-test. As a fellow student, I have to ask: who has the bandwidth during AP season to source 300 insects? It’s the ultimate irony: after spending a year studying the collapse of empires and the Black Plague, these students were defeated by a literal infestation. One has to wonder if the perpetrator thought “Biological warfare” was a valid interpretation of the prompt. Tragic!
Then there was the New York student who attempted an unorthodox approach to cheating. She carved a hidden compartment into her shoe to store her phone. Honestly, if I were the proctor and saw that level of craftsmanship, I would just let her continue. Unfortunately, her engineering was better than her technical settings; she was caught when she accidentally activated Siri mid-exam. It’s a special kind of nightmare to have your own footwear snitch on you to a proctor.
But the most dramatic moment belonged to a junior in California. During the AP Chemistry exam, he faked anaphylactic shock and was carried out of the room by two of his friends. While it looked like a medical emergency in the moment, the “victim” appeared perfectly fine just minutes after.
Look, I get it. AP season is brutal. The pressure is real, the stakes feel impossibly high, and the College Boards’s $98-per-exam price tag doesn’t exactly ease anyone’s nerves. But there has to be a line somewhere, and I think we can all agree that faking a life-threatening allergic reaction in front of 200 classmates crosses it. The sheer commitment to the bit is almost admirable, though. Two friends carrying him out? That’s Oscar-worthy. The way he clutched his throat? Impeccable acting. The fact that he was spotted looking completely fine five minutes later? Less convincing.
What strikes me most about these incidents isn’t the creativity or the desperation, it’s that sheer absurdity of the whole system. We have built an education culture where a single three hour test can feel like it determines your entire trajectory, and then we act surprised when students release 300 cockroaches in an attempt to skip it. Perhaps, if we didn’t load so much weight onto a standardized bubble sheet, students wouldn’t feel the need to smuggle phones in their shoes or fake an anaphylactic shock.
The College Board will undoubtedly respond with tighter security measures and more invasive bag checks, but none of that addresses the root problem, you can even require students to test in their socks, but you cannot confiscate the anxiety that drives a kid to fake anaphylaxis rather than face a chemistry FRQ.
Instead of ramping up the surveillance state of our testing centers, we should take a hard look at why students feel this cornered in the first place. At the end of the day, the real tragedy isn’t the cockroaches or the Siri snitch or even the fake medical emergency. The tragedy is that we’ve convinced an entire generation that their worth can be measured in scantron bubbles, and that some of them would rather face a shady cockroach dealer than a bad score.
