How is AP Spanish Literature?

PittPanther2013
Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:23:09 +0000

I would say self-studying for this exam is fairly difficult to do. I took this course senior year as well at TJHSST, and my teacher has a very high success rate - almost all of her students get 5’s (occassionally, one or two from her classes get lower if they stopped trying during second semester). We read ALL of the works over the school year, which was very difficult to keep up with - it is a lot of reading, looking up of words, etc. Workload-wise, it was the most difficult course I’ve taken. We also did a lot of practice writing.

The test (besides the essays, which I was very prepared for due to my teacher) was pretty difficult too - you read new passages/poems as well as old ones and are asked about them. Though I am normally good at comprehension, I don’t have a very large vocab, so even if I knew what the passage was about/what the questions were asking, I often had trouble picking the right answer choices because of my lack of vocab. I still got a 5, but it was most uncomfortable during the MC of that exam than any other AP.

It’s difficult to self-prepare because of the amount of works you need to look at (it would be hard for me to stay motivated on my own) and the level of comprehension they expect. Especially for the essays, you need to know all of the works pretty well to write a good essay (any of the stories/poems are open game, and you need to remember themes, characters, etc. from each), and our teacher told us what the AP keeps looking for (questions about identity, especially in relation to women). Also, the teacher can help you analyze the passsages, learn vocabulary/phrases specific to discussing prose/poetry, and point out things about the works you wouldn’t have noticed (I was one of the top students in my class, and even though I was able to figure out a lot of things about the work on my own, she revealed a lot of new things I didn’t notice (sometimes very big themes/symbols/metaphors) that I initially missed). When you are reading a foreign language, you miss certain subtletites that native speakers (or near that level) would catch, and comprehending something in a foreign language and then writing about it in that language is very difficult. With practice, it’s easy, but usually, a teacher really helps you develop those skills.

It’s not impossible, and I don’t know what the curve is (maybe it is large due to the difficulty of the exam), but I will not underplay that the self studying will require a lot of dedication. If you want to do it for fun, that’s fine. However, if you end up doing it, I would try getting your Spanish teacher to help you out along the way and find good translations of the works online/at a store to help you read everything.

If you have any more specific questions, feel free to ask.