The College Board is changing the AP registration process beginning in the 2019-20 school year, requiring students to sign up for the exams by Nov. 15 — four months earlier than the current system.

This change is meant to get more students to sign up for and to be motivated to do better on the AP tests, but it will most likely only add stress to the AP process.

Currently, students prepare for their tests throughout the school year and then decide in early spring whether or not they feel prepared enough to spend the $94 to take the test.

With the new system, students will be signed up to take the test from the beginning of the school year, even though they may lack confidence in the subject by the end of the year.

To make this issue worse, if students sign up after the deadline, they will face a $40 late fee. If they decide at the end of the year not to take the test, they will face a $40 cancellation fee.

The College Board did create a pilot program that was made up of more than 180,000 students to test this new system. The program did show an increase in student participation, but this may be more of a benefit for the College Board than for students.

The company’s annual revenue will be greatly helped by this increase in test takers, and the large late fee and cancelation fees likely show their true motivation for this change. This added participation may benefit the company, but it will also create a much more serious and stressful workload for students who would otherwise not take the test because they did not feel prepared.

In an article in The Washington Post, a New Jersey guidance counselor said seniors might be negatively affected by this change because they will not know if the college that they plan to attend will accept AP credits before the registration deadline. Thus, seniors in the upcoming school year may pay hundreds of dollars for tests that will be of no benefit to them at their future college.

Administrators and students alike oppose this change. An online petition on the change.org website calling for the College Board to not change the registration deadline has more than 100,000 signatures.

It seems as though the change is already set in stone. But the benefits of the change are far less clear.