College Board has redesigned two Advanced Placement courses with generative AI in mind, and it has taken opposite approaches in each. AP Computer Science Principles will put AI at the centre, ending with a project in which students build their own AI application. AP Seminar will keep responsible AI use as a formative part of the course, but students will write their scored essays in a secure environment, without AI access, under supervision.
Both redesigns launch in the 2027-28 school year. They were shaped by research College Board published on 23 September, drawn from surveys and focus groups with AP teachers between April 2025 and June 2026.
The logic is worth borrowing, whether or not your school teaches AP.
Same technology, two different answers
In AP Computer Science Principles, more than 80% of teachers said content on generative AI would be very or somewhat useful to students. The redesigned course embeds it across core units, including machine learning, algorithm development, data ethics and the societal impacts of AI, and adds a new culminating task, the AI Create Project.
AP Seminar teachers saw it differently. They ranked ethical considerations as the most helpful thing for students to learn about AI (68%), followed by using it to support research (62%). Using it for academic writing itself rated lower (51%). So the course will teach responsible use along the way, but the essays that count will be the student's own.
College Board's Jennifer Mulhern summarised what teachers told them: integrate AI where it deepens learning, protect learning where it doesn't, and give teachers real support either way.
Teachers' worries, and their own gaps
The research also captures the strain teachers are under. Across all AP teachers surveyed, 92% worry AI will leave students overly dependent on technology for basic tasks, and 90% worry students will be less likely to develop critical thinking. Yet 90% also agreed that schools have a responsibility to teach students to use AI responsibly.
By September 2025, 46% said they had some understanding of AI but still needed guidance themselves, and roughly a quarter worked in a school or district with no AI policy at all. Teachers also reported that tools for enforcing integrity were not good enough. One described dropping a commercial detector after it judged a student's original, AI-free essay to be 40% AI generated.
England's line on assessment
The same principle appears in a written answer from the Department for Education to the House of Lords on 7 October. The government said AI should support teaching and learning “while ensuring that assessments continue to reflect students' own knowledge, skills and understanding.” It noted that the vast majority of GCSE and A level assessments are taken under close supervision without access to the internet or AI, and that JCQ guidance treats misuse of AI as possible malpractice.
The answer closed with a sentence that could sit at the top of any school AI policy: “Education should prepare young people to thrive in a world shaped by AI, but the value of their achievements must remain beyond doubt.”
Do the same exercise in every department
College Board did not settle on one rule for AI. It asked what each course is for and then decided where AI helps and where it gets in the way. Any department can do the same.
Name where AI belongs in the course. In computing, it may be content in its own right. In history, it may be a source to evaluate. In languages, it may be a practice partner. Write it into the scheme of work, not just the policy.
Name the work that must be independent. Identify the tasks where the point is the pupil's own thinking: the assessed essay, the timed problem, the practical write-up. Protect those through how and where the work is done, not by relying on detection software.
Tell pupils the difference. A pupil who knows why AI is encouraged in one task and excluded from another is learning AI literacy. A pupil who only knows the rule is learning compliance.
Sources: College Board, AP teachers push for guardrails and support as GenAI reshapes the classroom, 23 September 2026; UK Parliament, written answer HL3374 on AI and assessments, 7 October 2026. Several College Board survey figures date from 2025; the course redesigns are plans for 2027-28.