Reflections on the 2021 English Literature Advanced Placement Reading

Once again I was an AP essay reader. Like last year, everything was done online. This year I was a virtual table leader responsible for my “table” of eleven readers. The table leader passes on information to the table and checks to see how accurately they are reading. The goal this year was that table leaders should read ten percent of the essays that their table scored to see how they are doing—to both encourage and to correct where needed. This new position gave me a slightly different perspective on the test, but it did confirm in my own mind that the AP program with its many years of experience knows what it is doing. Students taking the test can be confident that their tests are treated with respect. I thought I had a reliable and accurate table of readers.

This year I had the poetry question, question number one. Students and teachers can download a copy of the three essay questions on the printed test at AP Central online. I believe in my years as a reader that I have had the poetry question more than any of the other two.

Historically, students skip the poetry question more than the others. Apparently, poetry is not taught as much in schools these days. Back in the thirties and forties when my parents were in school, poetry was much bigger. My mother would recite poems to me she had had to memorize when she was in school.

This year was different, though. The poem, “The Saxophone Player” by Ai Ogawa, was nearly contemporary (1985) and was pretty straightforward. A greater proportion of students answered the poetry question than usual. Here are few hints from what I have observed from this year’s reading.

The question asked for “literary elements and techniques.” Some essays pointed out some techniques but did not do anything with that information that led to a thesis. For example, a student reading “A Red, Red Rose” might have pointed out “My love is like a red, red rose” is a simile. That is correct. But the important question is “So what?” How does the simile contribute to the effect of the poem or the meaning of the poem or whatever your thesis was?

The best essays kept the focus on the thesis. The best theses usually had a ring of originality to them. The question being asked about the poem “analyze how [the poet] uses literary elements to convey the complexity of the speaker’s encounter with the saxophone player…” A pedestrian thesis might be something like “the poet uses three figures of speech to illustrate the speaker’s meeting with the saxophone player.” That adds a little to the prompt, to the question being asked, but not much.

What would be more original or more “complex” would be to say how the poet meeting the saxophone player affected the poet in a specific way. The best essays noted that a change had taken place in the poet’s outlook—at least temporarily—and we can all learn something or appreciate that moment. I might add that there were some interesting interpretations, but if the essay writer supported the interpretation with evidence from the poem, from other sources, and uses reasonable logic, the student will get an “upper half” score (4,5, or 6 out of 6).

One other important hint I pass on to students regardless of what AP test they take. This year students were given the option of taking the written test as usual. They also could have taken the test on a different date online. There was software to download and protocols to follow, but they could.

Because the reading was online, the essay booklets were scanned by the Educational Testing Service and uploaded to the readers. The readers then read them on their computer screens. It was a little harder and quite a bit slower to read an essay posted online compared to reading the original exam booklet. This was an especial problem with handwriting that was hard to read. There were one or two that used ink that bled through the paper that made the writing hard to read. The solution to that is to simply write on one side of the paper.

The big problem was that some students’ handwriting is hard to read. In most cases the students know who they are. While readers really are trained to be impartial, if they have to decipher every word as they read, they do lose the train of thought. I suspect some students might have done better if they could have typed their essays.

Here is my recommendation. If the College Board continues with the online option next year, those of you whose handwriting is hard to read (and you know who you are) take the online test if you can. You type that. Your thinking will be much easier to trace and to understand. I realize that in some schools and districts, you might not have that choice, but if you do and your handwriting is hard to read, take the online exam.

I had a friend who had one of the online questions. Because fewer students took the online offering than the pen and pencil version, she finished early and spent the last two or three days of the week reading questions from the booklets like most of the other readers. She said not only did it go slower, but it was a lot harder to read them. The twenty or thirty percent of you whose handwriting is hard to read, take a hint. You will be glad you did, and so will the person or people who read your essay.

Obviously, this applies to any AP test that has free-response questions. Math, science, and history readers would appreciate it as well.

I noted two things on some essays that I believe reflect the times. A few essays stood out as being Marxist. Now part of that had to do with the description of the musician in the poem who looked lower class, while the poet did not sound that way. In the past, I have read essays from other passages that could have been interpreted with a Marxist flavor, such as the passage from Lawrence’s The Rainbow on the 2013 exam, but I do not recall any. Marxism does tend to oversimplify things, but it is taught in many university English departments these days, so such interpretations are not surprising. With the two leaders of Black Lives Matter boasting they are “trained Marxists,” class conflict seems to have become part of the zeitgeist.

The other thing that a number of readers noticed was that there was a more common use of them as a singular. In this past, this would have likely been part of an essay that generally displayed poor grammar. Not now. It is clear that some essays used them in order not to be gender-specific. It remains to be seen whether such language will be carried on, but that, too, is a sign of the times.

Old English was like German and Latin in that it had three genders. The declensions could have been called anything, but we use the terms masculine, feminine, and neuter. The genders were lost in Middle English except for the personal pronouns because people use them all the time. In early Modern English around 1600 we lost the general use of thee and thou for second person singular. You became singular as well as plural. Could something like that happen with he, she, and it? I guess time will tell.

My hope is that if this does change, people won’t be judging earlier writing. In the 1700s, for example, people used the word savage simply to mean someone who was tribal or uncivilized. It had little connotation one way or the other. Rousseau, indeed, spoke of the “noble savage.” Robinson Crusoe loved Friday, but he called him a savage because he was not from a literate urban environment. Now sometimes people read Rousseau or Defoe and suggest they were racist because they used such a word even though they were not. One hopes that people in the future will not read something with he and she and assume the writer must be sexist.