In this post, I’ll share my personal experience with the AP English class exam held at my school and give some advice that may help you prepare if you are a prospective AP English student. To provide context, I earned an A in the class and a 5 on the AP Exam.
Page 1 and Page 2 are for my narrative. Page 3 is for my advice. Click the buttons on the bottom of the page to access the content you wish.
The Set-Up
During the first few days of school, our class started off quite chill; we wrote a short analysis of our summer reading and received handouts of common AP Language & Composition terms. We started looking at the structure of the course and general format of the AP exam, basic stuff every student should know well for all of their classes.
My strengths are in the STEM field. Coming into the class, I knew that I had to put in extra effort to succeed. My English or “literacy” skills were above average, but not at the level where I can confidently achieve a level of proficiency. Some of my classmates took this class lightly; although I could have, I did not. Not only did I want to succeed in this class, but also bring my abilities from excellent to stellar.
Over the first three or four months, we went over the rhetorical analysis essay for the AP Exam, in which we analyze what the author is saying as well as how they say it. Our teacher Ms. D, emphasized that our writing should be focused on the how rather than the what. I took away the important aspect that you must be able to adeptly summarize the author’s argument before you can even inspect how the author is doing it. In other words, your reading comprehension should be amazing to construct an eloquent rhetorical essay.
Another neat thing we did was writing down the rhetorical choices an author made before starting to write our essay. I liked doing this as I could stay focused on explaining the “how” instead of paraphrasing the passage.
During the first quarter (Marking Period 1, as my school calls it), we started practicing timed essays in preparation for the AP exam. We had forty minutes to complete them. They were challenging at first, but after the first few I got the hang of them.
We did a myriad of practice essays. In my opinion, the ones we did in class gave us ample practice to review our prose and improve upon our mistakes. Looking back, I could’ve done more practice runs at home, as I didn’t do so until the week before the AP exam. Ms. D scored the essays according to the College Board rubric and gave us some helpful, incisive commentary.
Other than the essays, we did some multiple-choice sections in-class, reading comprehension exercises and many presentations. They were all helpful both in preparation for the exam and literacy improvement.