The main workshop post for these ETA exercises is here: AP Exam: Section II — ETA Workshop.
The full practice assignment for Section II is here: AP Exam: Section II — Workshop.
Section II, Question 1 — ETA Workshop
Synthesis: Students read several texts about a topic and create an argument that synthesizes at least three of the sources to support their thesis.
You can find these materials on the College Board’s website. I am organizing them for you so we can discuss the exemplary essays interstitially.
When studying on your own, look only at the highest-scoring essay. You can learn from the other ones, certainly, but it is a more efficient use of your time to deconstruct the essays that earn an 8 or 9. Each element of effective writing you would emulate in a timed setting is best demonstrated by those highest-scoring essays.
For the 2018 exam, however, you should look at both the essay earning an 8 and the essay earning a 6. The prompt is introduced below and given some context.
Note that for the purposes of this ETA workshop, we are only looking at the question from 2018.
2018 Exam: Question 1 Prompt
The main reason for us to consider Question 1 from the 2018 exam is the prompt’s topic: eminent domain. Here is what the Chief Reader Report has to say about it:
While the language was accessible, students seemed to lack familiarity with the topic, and many struggled. The struggles suggest many classes are not asking students to engage in subjects that are not within teenagers’ immediate concerns. As a result of this lack, many students merely repeated the provided information, not interrogating it or using it as a means to support their own claim.
In other words, this is not in your wheelhouse. Questions about public libraries, honor codes, and technology in schools — all topics on Question 1 in past years — are likely easier for you to write about. You start your reading of the sources already sure that you have outside information and understanding to use. Eminent domain, however, deals with property ownership, which is not, as the College Board says, “within teenagers’ immediate concerns.” Even the Question 1 Introduction is off-putting:
Eminent domain is the power governments have to acquire property from private owners for public use. The rationale behind eminent domain is that governments have greater legal authority over lands within their dominion than do private owners. Eminent domain has been instituted in one way or another throughout the world for hundreds of years.
Your job is to move quickly and completely past the need for the topic to be one of your “immediate concerns.” The sources will do some of that work for you, but in this case, you have to prove that you are imaginative and empathetic enough to see turn the topic of eminent domain into a workable prompt.
2018 Exam: Question 1 Scoring Guide
For this ETA work, you should start with the Chief Reader Report:
The reason why: You must separate what you know about synthesis writing in untimed essays, what you’ve been taught about document-based questions in other subjects, and what is required for this timed essay. When you have time for the writing process, you will almost always find the nuance in other voices and perspectives. In other subject areas, a document-based question will be scored with a different rubric — one that does not stress the same qualities that are stressed here.
In brief, you must be able to piece together a nuanced argument of your own from these sources. As the College Board puts it in that Chief Reader Report:
Students often do not recognize nuance within the provided sources. They need to see not only what the provided arguments claim, but the context in which these arguments were created…
Students tend to create their arguments within a binary, as if the responses to the issues are either all good or all bad. Students need to recognize that most contested issues are contested because there often is sound support for all sides of the issue.
In our course, you have read widely and practiced exactly this sort of critical thinking. It’s now a matter of pulling it together in 40 minutes. The time constraints are unfair, at least in a writing-outside-of-tests sense, but it is still more than possible to work with these sources. As the Overview in the Scoring Guide puts it:
To do well, students were expected to understand that they were, in essence, creating an argument using the supplied information, as well as knowledge that they already possessed. Students also needed to understand that, with sources arguing among one another, students did not have to accept each source as “correct,” but rather, they needed to evaluate the provided information based on their own knowledge and perceptions of the world.
Emphasis mine. You are a thoughtful, experienced human being; your perspective must be on equal footing with the sources that are talking with each other (or, as that overview says, “arguing among one another”).
As for the scored essays themselves: Pay careful attention to the use of the counterargument in the essay earning an 8 (“Additionally, the fourth paragraph presents a counterargument regarding the constitutionality of eminent domain and then offers an effective rebuttal”), and note that the essay earning a 6 is successful in using multiple sources in a paragraph (“the third paragraph provides an adequate explanation of “false promises” and uses sources B and D to sufficiently support the argument”).
Q&A: Interstitial ETA Work
Start with whatever directions you are given through Google Classroom. That’s where you’ll find any formal work associated with this prompt. It’s up to you, however, to utilize this opportunity to prepare for the exam. Ask questions in the comment section below. Invite your peers and teacher into a discussion of how these high-scoring essays work and how you can emulate them.