Valuable Insights for Students Preparing for the AP Lit Exam and Crafting High-Quality Essays
I like to do a few weeks of specific test prep before the AP Exam to reinforce what we’ve been learning all year and put it into a test-specific context. To do this, I have a PowerPoint that helps guide my lessons.
My students feel so much more prepared now that I’ve added these lessons, and their scores improved as well! I always had students split about evenly between 4’s and 5’s, with a few 3’s and a rare 2. But after adding this test prep, we score almost all 4’s and 5’s now!
If you want to make your own, I’ll provide some advice about what I cover in my classroom:
First, take a strategic approach to time management, recommending that students allocate 40 minutes per essay. Emphasize the need to carefully read and understand the prompts, and encourage students to underline and circle key words and phrases in the prompts. Additionally, I advise skimming over the essays first & saving the most challenging essay for last (this is subjective, obviously).
Next, crafting a well-structured essay is vital, and you’ll need to provide your kids with strategies for doing so. Reinforce what you’ve taught them all year, stressing the significance of a strong thesis, and urge students to go beyond restating the prompt and to focus on making unique and insightful points. Then, highlight the importance of developing clear and deliberate body paragraphs, with an emphasis on making claims, providing evidence, adding commentary as necessary, and avoiding unnecessary summarization.
You may then want to offer specific advice for prose and poetry essays, emphasizing the use of brief quotations and maintaining a formal, scholarly tone. Caution your students against using pretentious or obscure language and encourage students to make an attempt to vary their sentence lengths and types. I know they are in a hurry, but style does matter! If possible, they should pay it some attention!
Preparedness, understanding prompts, and effective time management are skills that are beneficial to our students in all areas of life, so don’t fret that you are “wasting time” on test prep when you could be teaching content. Kids don’t have the life experience we do, and they absolutely do NEED explicit teaching of strategies and soft skills! Give it a try this year. I promise you’ll be glad you did when you see the improvement in your kids’ scores!
Want My PowerPoint Lessons for This?
Want my Four-Page “How To” Handout for AP Lit Essays?
Bonus: Common Mistakes to Avoid!
Warn your students against trying to study too many literary works before the exam. They should choose 3-4 and know them VERY well rather than 5-6 they only know on a surface level.
Also, warn your students against spending a ton of time on one essay thinking if it earns a high score, it won’t matter if the other two are rushed, or if they don’t get to one. It matters A LOT! Let’s say you do earn a 9 on one essay, but then a 5 on the next and 0 because you skipped the third. That’s 14 points. But what if you spread out your time and effort and earned a 6 on all three? That’s an 18!
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