Emily Franzen
Educational Studies 360
February 18, 2009
Advanced Placement Exams and Affected Effectiveness
Advanced Placement courses and exams place a high priority on student motivation,
diligence, and academic excellence. Typically, students who attend AP courses tend to do
better on college exams and achieve better test scores than those who do not. The logical
connection to make is that students in AP courses are motivated, diligent, and devoted to
academic excellence. Whether or not this slew of adjectives is true or not depends largely on
the student, the class, the school, and the state. However, we can examine such specific
courses as the CollegeBoard AP English Language and Composition course description under
a close microscope for the consistency, bias, and relevance of its precepts to better answer
how we are typifying our students by putting them in such courses and into such exams.
The AP English Language and Composition thick description from CollegeBoard
provides a rich diversity of possible subjects and authors and writing opportunities for
students. For example, a course on liberty could span the gamut of reading material into the
realms of Toni Morrison, Emile Zola, Frederick Douglas, and John Stuart Mill (9). The
description does not limit itself to certain texts of the “established canon” also known as the
canon of “dead, white, and male.” Most of the books are award-winners, autobiographies,
political, literary, and fictional writers or poets, and the description discusses the aspects of
the writing process with which students should experiment including informal and formal
writing situations with a variety of purposes and audiences.
Though the expectations of the course description are noble and versatile, the exam,
model multiple-choice questions, and exam questions which follow bring questions of
1
consistency, relevance, and bias to light. For now disregarding the sticky question of whether
or not testing clearly determines any part of student understanding, there is a lack of
consistency between what the description of the course upholds and what the exam questions
of the same AP course signify. For example, the AP course description assumes that AP
students have a ready knowledge of English grammar and usage but also states that the exam
will include questions to that effect anyway. Granted, these questions are marginalized in
favor of analytical questions, but how does a student’s answer to one question about an
antecedent in the second paragraph of a passage exemplify a thorough understanding of
English grammar?
In addition to asking insignificant questions on grammar, the AP exam’s multiplechoice questions do not take individuality into account. For example, students are set sixty
minutes to read three passages of varied literature and answer questions on each passage.
Depending on the type and length of each, students will read faster or slower, not at the same
rate for each as the time limit assumes (twenty minutes per segment). An autobiography or
fictional segment is far easier and quicker to read than text from an engineering textbook, and
therefore, swiftness in reading is valued over comprehension by sheer necessity. Not only
does this time limit suggest a bias in favor of a particular kind of student, but it also does
students a disservice by rushing them.
In addition to providing a set number of minutes, the exam also gives students a small
portion of a larger essay, autobiography, or other text to examine in the multiple-choice
section. AP courses emphasize holistic works of literature broken into smaller units in a
classroom, not paragraphs broken into lines or individual words. Questions to this effect in the
AP exam can seem overly punctilious. Classroom instruction is also usually accompanied by
2
social, historical, ideological context, unavailable in an exam. Reading is meant to be done
within a certain context—to deprive students of that valuable schema is to deprive them of the
larger picture of reading comprehension. No starting point exists when the provided segment
begins in the middle of the essay with the only preface being “this is taken from an
autobiographical work in the nineteenth-century essay.” Such a presentation seldom if ever
happens in any other institution-guided reading in AP classes and renders the exam questions
less relevant.
Though the multiple-choice section has its difficulties, the writing portion of the AP
exam has even moreso in terms of inconsistencies with the course description. The AP course
description states that students in AP classes should learn to write for a variety of purposes
and, by extension, audiences for both formal and informal purposes. Yet the emphasis of the
exam falls largely on “formal” writing, unconsciously devaluing informal, or perhaps
assuming that informal writing is less assessable than formal with its complex arguments,
examples, comparisons and so forth. By ignoring part of writing, the exam also ignores a
large portion of the writing process itself and its inherent “inquiry and research, drafting,
revising, editing, and review” (11). With only forty minutes to produce a sound and complete
argument, students must sacrifice the very steps of the writing process that the description so
lauds.
Along with a neglect of the writing process itself, the questions that constitute the
writing portion of the exam also neglect other aspects of writing. Analytical and
argumentative questions command, if not dominate, the writing rather than any descriptive,
reflective, or personal aspects of it. This exclusion reveals a long-held bias about what
constitutes as “good” writing. Just like what constitutes “good” literature, there are variations
3
and variable opinions. According to the exam, argumentative and analytical writing trump
personal reflections and descriptive or exploratory writing. Along with a bias towards a
certain type of writing over another, the AP exam also shuns the very precept it claims it
wants students to be familiar with. Students are never told in their prompts who they are
writing for or what the purpose of their writing is: two monumental tasks of the writing
process emphasized over and over again in the course description and yet neglected in the test
itself.
Such difficulties are what form the challenges for teachers who step into AP courses.
One of the biggest challenges a teacher faces is spending half of the year teaching students
one way to approach the writing process (drafting, revising, rewriting) and then telling them
they must approach it another way for the sake of a few tests—with timed prompts and little
time to draft or revise, save for a spot-check for spelling. These two disparate ways jar and
could possibly confuse students. Another problem for teachers and students alike is being
timed. They are given three hours to demonstrate their mastery at certain skills in writing and
reading—I understand this time limit is set for the sake of practicality, but that does not mean
such a limit is right or that it will yield desired, accurate results.
AP courses offer a variety of reading and writing goals for students which is beneficial
to student learning. However, the exam that tests the skills learned in those classes leaves
much to be desired in the form of consistency, bias, and relevance. Unless a series of heavy
test revisions occurs, the reliability of their assessment will continue to be questioned.
4