Should I pay to get my students' AP exam booklets back?

On a physics message board, the question was asked: is it worth paying the College Board to get your students' AP exam booklets back?  Here's my answer...

It is SO not worth it.  They just give you the students' free response exam booklets - no other feedback.  Yes, you can look at the released rubrics and figure out their score on each question.  But that's trying to groom the horses long after they've escaped from the barn.  

You have access to so many officially released problems and rubrics from previous years!  Use those, especially during March and April.  You'll have a pretty danged good idea of what your students can do.  If one particular student over- or under- performs, don't worry about it.  If the whole class over- or under- performs compared to their scores on released rubrics in March and April, then look at the (free) score report to see if you can figure out what happened.  Your time is better spent preparing for and working with next year's students than trying to figure out the details of this year's class's performance.  

I suggest here thinking of a perspective integrated over multiple years, over multiple classes of students.  In that long term, any individual's exam, any individual's particular response, will be lost in the overall performance.  If you're consistently doing better on multiple choice than free response over many years, then it's worth taking action to improve free response.  If you're consistently bombing the circuits questions, then take action to improve the circuits portion of your class.  But these sorts of patterns can be gleaned from the information that the College Board gives you for free.