Here are some reflections on the AP reading this year. Most of these are general and ought to be applied to anyone taking either of the Advanced Placement English exams, not to mention History or other cultural subjects. I read for the English Literature and Composition exam. Readers for the English Language and Composition test worked with us, and we often compared our experiences.

First, and this is most important. This even applies to the math AP test. Answer the question being asked. This does mean that you have to read the question. Nearly all the readers of the AP Language synthesis question complained that many students made no attempt to answer the question being asked. The question was simply “whether college is worth its cost.”

Many students wrote about going to college or how a college education would be helpful to them, but that was not what the question asked. The question was about the cost of college. That was what the students should have focused on.

As I have told my students but is worth repeating, on any open question such as the synthesis question or the argumentation question on the AP Language, develop your thesis first. Too many of the essays were simply a summary of what the works said. If you think about it, that is really insulting. It is as if the readers cannot understand the passages. Clearly, that is not what you are supposed to write about.

For example, on that college expense question, you probably had three approaches: (1) college is worth it, (2) college is not worth the expense, (3) position 1 or 2 with some qualifications.

The next thing to think about is to put the ideas into your own words. Instead of saying, “Yes, college education is worth the cost,” add some pizzazz. Say something like “College is a bargain” or “Compared to bottled water or designer handbags, a college education will pay for itself.”

Think about that kind of approach when you are answering the essays on the Literature exam, too. This year the poetry selection was a sonnet about a man who liked a girl who was not interested in him. How common is that?  Virtually any high school student could have done something really lively on the subject if he or she thought about it for a few minutes. Good essays sometimes included things expressing the writer’s own frustrations in relationships or complaining about some unwanted “stalker.” There is a lot of potential there in answering such questions.

Another thing I want to emphasize when reading a passage in either AP exam is to consider the context as best you can. That does two things: You can add your own knowledge to sound really intelligent, and you can keep yourself from sounding stupid.

The sonnet on the literature exam was published in 1573. The AP exams virtually always give the dates of the selections you have to read. A few students wrote about how this connected with items in American history, that is, the history of the United States! Didn’t those students ever hear of 1776? Two centuries is not trivial unless you are an astronomer.

Some things the readers are willing to forgive. A few students wrote about Shakespeare. Now, Shakespeare was alive in 1573, but he was only 8 or 9 years old, so it is unlikely Shakespeare would have influenced that poem. Still for most readers that was not a deal-breaker in and of itself because at least the student had the correct century. A few students mentioned Spenser, Sidney, or Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella as models. Those would have been on target.

Even more generally, bring in what you know. The 2013 prose selection from the AP Literature exam had a passage from Lawrence’s The Rainbow. It included very clear descriptions based on the four humors. It also contained obvious Biblical allusions. When asked to comment on the character, either one of those things would have added immensely to the interpretation. Most of the good essays included at least one of those things if not both.

Indeed, just as Joyce’s Ulysses is loosely based on The Odyssey, The Rainbow is loosely based on the first eleven chapters of Genesis, from Eden to the promise of the rainbow. No reader expected a student to know that about the book, but a sharp reader would have seen the references to the Garden of Eden in the passage chosen.

I recommend that anyone taking AP Literature learn about the humors and read at least the narrative and poetic parts of the Bible. When the United States Supreme Court banned the Bible from public schools in 1963, it pretty much guaranteed there would be a dumbing down of the student body. Lawrence and Joyce were neither Christian nor Jewish, but it is impossible to fully understand either writer without a knowledge of the Bible. That goes for just about anyone writing in English from the Seafarer poet to Edward P. Jones, author of the 2014 AP prose selection which was published in 2003.

Some of the most egregiously poor writing in 2014 was done for that passage from Jones’ The Known World, a wonderful book reviewed in this blog. The reason was that the student writers did not understand the context. The passage tells us that the character in the story named Moses had worked fourteen hours that day. The passage also makes it clear several times that Moses is a slave. Readers were baffled by how many students either overlooked that important detail or had no idea what a slave was.

One reader who had that question was amazed at how many students said that Moses had a strong work ethic or words to that effect.  He said, “I’d work for fifteen hours if there was a gun to my head!”

The fact that Moses was a slave also gives us a clue as to when the story is set. It is clearly set before the end of the Civil War, probably earlier or the war would have been mentioned.

Some students pointed out that Moses is an important character in the Bible. Slaves were sometimes named Moses. Even today it is more common among African-Americans than among the general population of America. The name Moses could be suggestive of some things related to the life of a slave. The Biblical Moses, after all, led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and into the liberty of the Promised Land. However, even this passage suggests that Moses’ name may be ironic. The Biblical Moses was trained “in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” and “spoke face to face with God.” This Moses is confined to his little “known world” of a few fields, a woods, and some cabins. He does have some folk wisdom, but he does not appear to be going anywhere. If he had a chance to lead some slave to freedom, would he even know where to go?

At any rate, learn to apply what you already know, whether about literature, history, or any other subject that may appear on the essays.

I also noticed a kind of “word inflation” among the essays. Usually these were not essays that were great, and one reason was that the students did not know how to use correctly the words they used.

Words that end in -ism, -ist, -istic, or some variation usually have a very specialized meaning. No one would use the word communist when they meant “common.” But many students used simplistic when they meant “simple.” There is a big difference between those two words! Calling my solution simple is a compliment. Calling my solution simplistic is an insult. Other word pairs students need to keep straight are parallel and parallelism and animal and animalistic. The poet used images from the animal world. Yes, one could say that he used animal images. But calling those images animalistic is saying something entirely different!

Another common complaint among readers is writing that did not keep the parts of speech straight. Feel is a verb. When used as a noun, at best it is slang or salacious. Use feeling or sensation instead. Reveal is also a verb. The noun form is revelation. Anyone taking an AP class should know the language well enough to distinguish parts of speech.

Usually ordinary readers do not get to hear too many statistics, other than the total number of tests taken for their subject. This year we learned that just under 400,000 students took the AP Literature test and that over 507,000 English Language and Composition tests were taken. From one source it sounds like 386,000 took the U.S. History exam, making the two English AP tests the two most popular this year.

I also learned that the average score for Question #1 on the Literature test was just under 4.2 at 4.17. The average score for Question #1 on the Language test was about 4.75. Both of those were a little higher than usual, but readers generally thought that this year’s topics were a little more accessible to students: Frustration in love and costs of college are some things that most high school juniors and seniors are at least aware of.