Tips on Proctoring AP’s (with Audacity)

We know proctoring AP language exams can be a stressful time for everyone involved: students, proctor, and IT.

To help alleviate stress, College Board has released an official guide on how to use Audacity, a free audio tool for Windows/Mac, to capture student’s oral responses during the exam (official CB guide link).

What’s missing from this guide are common problems that could happen on test day. Our years of experience with the exam have exposed us to all kinds of problems that could happen and ways to prevent them. So why not share them?

In this blog post, we will address these problems, our tips, and our recommendations to make test day as smooth as possible with Audacity.

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Creating your own audio lessons with QuickTime Player

Teachers often ask us how to create their own audio lessons for use in DiLL. A general workflow will look like:

  1. Create your audio lesson file using a 3rd party application like GarageBand, Audacity, QuickTime, etc. (You can even do this on your iOS device using the included Voice Memo app)
  2. Upload your audio lesson file to the DiLL Server (see blog post: How-To: Uploading Audio Files to DiLL Server)
  3. Assign the audio lesson to your students in DiLL by creating and using a Task

In this blog post, we’ll be using the QuickTime player to create a simple audio lesson.

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Promoting a User Account to “Teacher”

Promoting a user account to “Teacher” status in DiLL is performed via the DiLL Server Web Interface.

DiLL has three user account tiers:

  1. Super User
  2. Teacher
  3. Student
Access the DiLL Web Interface to: Super User Teacher Student
  Review and download student recordings
  View and assign private lesson tracks
  Add, update, delete content: subjects, books, lessons
  Create, modify, delete user accounts
  Set fallback passwords for user accounts
  Promote accounts to “Teacher” and “Super User”
  Assign subjects to teachers
Upload lesson tracks using Dill Catalog Manager


Note: students cannot access the DiLL Web Interface. By default, all accounts are student accounts until promoted to Teacher and/or Super User. 

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Uploading Audio Files to DiLL Server


Every DiLL school has their own DiLL Server that hosts the various audio lesson materials used by that school’s world language department.  These materials can come from a variety of sources, unique to each department and school:

  • Audio CDs that accompany language textbooks
  • Audio materials on textbook publishers’ websites
  • Free online materials (e.g., iTunes University)
  • Audio created by the teacher (using tools like QuickTime, GarageBand, Audacity, etc.)

Thankfully uploading files to DiLL is easy and quick and we’ve created a special application, the DiLL Catalog Manager, to streamline the process.

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