He is basing his assessments on the grading rubric and has plenty of students that scored 4s and 5s and cannot understand her score, since he deemed her essay quality better than almost all of them. Anyways will see what happens. She has a lot of other great scores, grades etc so this really shouldn’t affect her college admissions. Just super frustrating for her and shocking for her teacher who is a very experienced AP Lang teacher from a highly regarded HS.