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Namwali Serpell, an author and English professor at Harvard University, was confounded: A slew of fresh online reviews described her book - which was well-received when it was published more than four years ago - as pretentious, confusing and even "RUINING HIGH SCHOOLERS' LIVES."
As Serpell pored over the visceral comments and one-star reviews flooding platforms such as Goodreads, she pieced together what happened: The Advanced Placement language exam, taken by students across the country on May 14, had used an excerpt from her collection of essays, "Stranger Faces."
Students complained that the passage featured on the exam was confusing and contradictory, and that the multiple-choice questions about it were vague and overly subjective. Students took to Reddit and TikTok to speculate that their scores - and their chances to earn college credit or higher placement in classes - could be ruined.
Serpell, herself a longtime critic of standardized tests, said the College Board, the billion-dollar standardized-testing juggernaut that administers them, did not ask permission to use her work and distorted her writing.
"Stranger Faces," a collection of essays on the pleasure people take in unusual faces in works of art, was geared toward professional scholars, not high school readers, Serpell said, and she insists that the complexity of her writing can only be understood in fuller context. The exam excerpt, she said, omitted critical writing that would have made her arguments and rhetorical effects clearer.
As Serpell deals with the fallout - which, in some cases, she said, included death threats - she is siding with the students, taking up their arguments with the College Board and touching off a heated online debate over academic ethics.
"They really messed up in not asking me, in particular, because I have very pointed views on standardized testing," Serpell said of the College Board, which administers the SAT and the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test in addition to AP exams.
To Serpell, the controversy is a troubling example of how education and learning are increasingly treated like profit-driven commodities. Both students and authors, Serpell said, are "being treated as ‘content' to make money for executives."
A spokesperson for the College Board, Sara Sympson, said in a statement that the organization has a standard permission process for clearing materials that appear in its exams. "In this particular case, it was determined that the passage fell within fair use," Sympson said.
In an email to Serpell reviewed by The Washington Post, the College Board said a vendor, Educational Testing Service, determined that excerpting "Stranger Faces" constituted fair use and did not require Serpell's or her publisher's permission. They also offered Serpell a retroactive licensing fee.
The College Board did not provide Serpell or The Post with the exam questions or with how the excerpt was presented to students. But based on the conversations circulating in online forums, Serpell says she believes the excerpt used in the test features the introduction to her book, which is a meditation on the symbolism of faces and identity, but cuts off before a later passage that deliberately undermines the premise of everything she wrote in the lead-up. Serpell called it a "rhetorical straw man."
"I find it really troubling that the [College Board] would use something I'm not saying to test students."
Each year, more than a half-million high-schoolers take the AP language exam and hope to score well enough to earn college credit or placement into college courses. Though students who take AP courses are not required to take the exam, they cannot receive college credit without an AP exam score. This year, the standard exam fee was $99.
When she was previously a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, Serpell advocated for her department to end its GRE requirement, arguing that research indicates that standardized tests are not a strong predictor of academic success and tend to correlate with a student's family income, race and gender.
The AP exam, Serpell argues, encourages "teaching to the test," shepherding students to read and understand literature to fit the mold of test questions, rather than reading for enjoyment, reflection or curiosity.
That was not the overwhelming attitude expressed in many of the recent reviews. "I know what inspired you. RUINING HIGH SCHOOLERS' LIVES," read a one-star review of "Stranger Faces" on Goodreads that was later deleted. (Post owner Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon, which owns the popular book-review platform.)
Serpell wants the College Board to give students full credit for the portion of the AP exam that related to her excerpt; commit to an approval process for any living author whose work it wishes to use in future exams; and publicly apologize. The College Board appeared to decline, telling Serpell in an email reply that it disagreed that it acted "illegally or improperly."
Many of the students who had maligned Serpell are now siding with her against the College Board and encouraging her to sue, according to Serpell and messages from students reviewed by The Post.
Yet determining "fair use" is almost always a toss-up with no clear, easily predicted answer, said Paul Goldstein, a professor at Stanford Law School and an expert on U.S. copyright law.
"On the one hand, a court may find the excerpted work is not being used as a teaching tool to explore the [literary] style or the author," Goldstein said. A court could also take a more expansive view of what "teaching" means, that exam-giving is a part of the teaching process, making the work permissible under fair use. "This is a ‘knife's edge' dispute," Goldstein said.
The negative reviews of "Stranger Faces" don't worry its publisher, because the book has been out for more than four years and was well-reviewed upon its release, said Adam Levy, the publisher of Transit Books, which released "Stranger Faces."
"The best thing that could come out of this is driving a conversation, and driving new interest in the book," Levy said.
One potential silver lining, according to Serpell: As students watch the dispute unfold between Serpell and the College Board, they have debated literature, standardized testing and academic integrity.
"They're actually learning more from this issue than the test itself," Serpell said.