Ranking My AP Proctors

By Siona Kirschner

In a fun new development, I have run out of things to rank and am moving on to ranking people. This is completely and entirely okay though because I’m just ranking my personal experience with their proctoring and their abilities in a very specific role. Without further ado, we’ll be going in order from worst to best.

1. AP Precalc: -22/10

   I don’t even remember the proctor themself during this exam. For all I know, they were lovely and iconic and brought snacks. However, what I do remember is that there was a BIRD IN THE ROOM THE ENTIRE TIME. Like a living, flying, chirping bird. Just flying around the room. I was next to the window so I was intensely afraid that the bird would hit that window and fall onto my test. I spent the MCQ section determining that it would be more morally correct to pause my test-taking to tend to the injured bird should that happen. Luckily, it did not. When the test ended, a kid picked up the bird and carried it out of the room, which was marvelous behavior but I feel like that should have been the proctor’s responsibility. I got to feed it some trail mix though to help it stop being disoriented from being indoors, so that was great. It goes without saying that the bird, though she doesn’t quite fit into the category of this piece, earns a 10/10 in everything.

2. AP French: 0/10

   I want to cut this proctor some slack since it was clearly her first time proctoring, but I can’t actually give her any points on account of the electronic dance music that began and continued to play during the test. You just can’t recover from that. We were also severely off schedule and weren’t freed for four and a half hours. I was none too pleased.

3.  AP Chem: 2/10

   The proctor yelled at us right before the test 😔. She also chose to shelaborate on the already harsh part of the little collegeboard script about cheating by saying that she “would not hesitate to report any troublesome behavior” (she didn’t even actually use a fun word like “troublesome”). However, she does get 1.5 points for bringing us chips! And another half point because she made it very clear she was having a day and I wanted to be sympathetic.

4. Literally Every Other AP I’ve Taken: 10/10

   Strangely, I’ve had the same pair of proctors for every other AP test I’ve taken. They’re an iconic duo who bring snacks, show up in their pajama pants two minutes before the start of the exam, and very clearly text with each other for the entirety of the test. Flawless behavior. 

5. AP Physics 1: 100000000/10

   Absolute lovely person, icon, and whatever the male version of a shero is. He interrupted the mean part of the College Board script to say that he doesn’t like the negativity they impart right before the test (anti-College Board activist legend), brought snacks, shared a funny anecdote, and seemed genuinely proud of us for finishing the test. He also resembled Heimler (the history guy)!