<p>I teach AP Language and I would like to know from students who have taken the exam (especially since the synthesis question was introduced) what preparation did you find invaluable for the exam?</p>
<p>I already do some things like blocks of APMCs and a researched argument paper, but I wonder if the exam brought out need that you didn’t realize until the day of.</p>
<p>The AP Lang exam is a hard exam to prep for because any prompt in the world is perfectly legal. Teach your students a lot of different rhetoric devices!!! That way your students will have plenty to talk about during a couple of essays. The best thing to do is practice practice and more practice!! esp. essays!! Give your students a LOT of AP essays to write and make sure you teach them the proper way to write the essay. Essays are 60% of the exam if I’m not mistaken and the MC is mainly you get it or you don’t. I think spending more time on essays would be wiser</p>
<p>Yeah it is 55% to 45% so we have to spend time on essays. I was wondering more about whether some of the recent testers had seen more on the test that was current events vs. pre-20th Century and the like. I have moved away from literary terms and devices except for about 35 that seem to appear consistently, and I spend a lot more time on developing an argument and defending one due to the emphasis on it.</p>
<p>I guess what I see is numerous posters that claim to have done extremely well on the test (many of whom, I am confident did), and I want to see what would they emphasize if they were teaching a course.</p>
<p>^ english language MC is like an easier form of the reading section of the SAT. just expose them to the MC questions and they will be fine come the AP (and the SAT)</p>
<p>^^easier? many in fact argue that it is harder…</p>
<p>really? i found it much easier. i did only get a 4 though.</p>
<p>My teacher has a fairly high pass rate for the Lang exam compared to other APs at my school. He assigns 2 days once a month that all students must be there for (they get an automatic A for the day if they are there, or F if they aren’t) and he makes us do a practice test the first day and the second we write an essay. I think it really helps because we are exposed to the type of questions and what not and then he goes over everything with us. He also has us keep a small notebook of literary terms and as we cover them in class, we are supposed to write them in our notebook, that way they naturally add up over time and it won’t be overwhelming.</p>
<p>Thanks. I appreciate your input. I tell my students that the AP Lang adn SAT questions are very similar except the emphasis in Lang is slanted towards devices and lit terms, while the SAT focuses more on purpose. I do blocks of AP multiple choice (2 at a time now, 3 at a time later in the year) to build stamina, and essays weekly or every other week, with explanations for each too.</p>
<p>I guess my big question centers on the fact that we cut out one of our novels this year, so I want to fill the “hole” with the most useful practice material I can. My former students say that the Argumentation research paper we do and the APM/C blocks are the most useful, but I am not killing my students with another paper, and I don’t want to risk burning out my students with too many blocks (most of them take 2-4 other AP classes).</p>
<p>I was thinking about using some days to read some short essays by common AP authors and work some debates or tie them to modern issues (if they are pre-20th) or something like that. Does that sound like something that would sharpen their skills more than another APM/C?</p>
<p>AP English Language…lol. </p>
<p>Just be good at SAT critical reading and know how to get a 10+ on the essay and you can just wing this sucker. So…give your kids CR practice tests. That test is much more hardcore and will whip 'em into shape for the fairly easy MC questions.</p>
<p>My AP English teacher did something really interesting for us once. He gave us all a copy of a prompt that he had never seen before and took 40 minutes to write an entire essay on the overhead for the class. It helped all of us to understand how we should pace ourselves for each essay on the actual test day. Also, I found working in groups to be really beneficial. Visual literacy exercises, MC question writing, and annotation of essays were a few of the things that were best accomplished in groups.</p>
<p>One thing that my AP English teacher did not emphasize was test-taking strategy. I think it would have benefitted our class to review when it is appropriate to guess, how the final scores are calculated from the raw score, etc. The Princeton Review book (as well as others, I assume) discusses this in the first chapter and I found it particularly enlightening.</p>
<p>I hope this gave you a few ideas. By the way, I got a 5 on the exam last year.</p>
<p>in-class essays, while a drag, are good practice. I think practicing a synthesis essay, even if it’s not in-class, would be important also. make sure you’re students don’t just know the definition of the rhetorical strategies, but how to employ them. the essay are really stupid and unpredictable; last year’s synthesis essay was about pennies (?!), so I think it’s more important to know what kind of essays are offered and how to write them rather than guess what they’ll be about.</p>
<p>on the multiple choice test, I’d recommend doing a practice multiple choice test, and then having students meet in groups, go through the test, and try to come up with a consensus on what the right answers are. then go over the test as a class. 90% of the time they’ll come up with the right answer and almost always the entire class will be able to resolve remaining discrepancies. by having people have to defend why they chose a certain answer and consider the reasons other people chose, students learn much more than if you just graded a multiple choice section and they didn’t know why their answers were wrong or why the correct answers were right. I disagree a lot with arachnotron, I think the AP MC questions are much harder than the CR questions.</p>
<p>(I also got a 5 last year.)</p>