Gamesmanship: AP English Lang. & Comp. Exam


Gaming the AP Exam, Part ∞


We’ve talked a lot this year about how to approach your AP exam — the first full post on the matter was five months ago — and you’ve now had an extra week to prep. You should be generating plenty of evidence of your preparations. The last thing to add might be this: a bit of number-crunching à la today’s post on the Regents Exam.

You have copies of the scoring rubrics, worksheets, etc., from the work that started on April 29. You also have had access to this site:

http://appass.com/calculators/englishlanguage

That site runs the numbers for you. It makes gamesmanship far easier. What I’d like to do is give you advice about how to massage your confidence and troubleshoot your last-minute preparations through that site and the other scoring materials you have.


By the Numbers


This the benchmark I’d use:

Why use a 5? Because it’s actually not that far off from the middle of the bell curve:

Any student with a bit of natural ability who works hard all year in our course is capable of this. It’s at the high end of that middle part of the curve, but you have to think of it in qualitative terms: You’re getting about three-fourths of the multiple-choice correct, and you’re writing three adequate essays. That’s what the rubric tells you: 6 means an adequate response.

What we’ll look at here is how the scoring composite shifts if you average other scores across your three essays, and how many multiple-choice answers you’d need correct to cross the threshold for a 3, 4, or 5.

All 6s

Set the number of correct answers on Section I as the first variable, X, and the final AP exam score as the second variable, Y. If you average a 6 across all three essays, Section I breaks down like this:

  • When X ≥ 16, Y ≥ 3
  • When X ≥ 31, Y ≥ 4
  • When X ≥ 42, Y = 5

What’s remarkable, then, about pulling together three adequate responses is that you will pass with just 30% correct on Section I. If you write two adequate responses, but the third is a 7, then the thresholds drop by two points each:

  • When X ≥ 14, Y ≥ 3
  • When X ≥ 29, Y ≥ 4
  • When X ≥ 40, Y = 5
All 5s

It’s more likely that you’ll write at least one uneven response — one that has flaws, but manages to answer the prompt to some extent. You are capable of more, but time and the vagaries of the testing environment might conspire against you. (You might not have prepared as much as you could have this year, too, but that’s a self-imposed handicap.) If you average a 5 across all three essays, Section I breaks down like this:

  • When X ≥ 24, Y ≥ 3
  • When X ≥ 39, Y ≥ 4
  • When X ≥ 50, Y = 5

50+ on Section I is hard to predict, even for the strongest among you. What’s more helpful is that 75% of you were scoring at or above 39 as we practiced Section I, so 75% of you could set your goal at a 4 overall. And what might be most helpful is that you can miss half of the multiple-choice and still look to pass, if your essays are at the level of a 5 or higher.

if you manage one adequate response with two 5s, the thresholds drop by three points:

  • When X ≥ 21, Y ≥ 3
  • When X ≥ 36, Y ≥ 4
  • When X ≥ 47, Y = 5
All 4s

Essays at this level, as you know, fail to answer the prompt adequately. Each and every student reading this right now is capable of a timed essay better than a 4, but it’s also likely and fine that some of you will write a response at this level on the actual exam. Time, pressure, anxiety, etc., all warp the performance. Even if you averaged a 4 on all three essays, however, you’d have a good chance to pass. Section I would break down like this:

  • When X ≥ 31, Y ≥ 3
  • When X ≥ 46, Y = 4

You can’t earn a 5 if your essays are all 4s, but getting 56% of the multiple-choice correct would be enough for you to pass. That’s reassuring, or at least should be, because every single one of you who recorded your practice Section I data were at 32 or higher.

All 3s

You know that essays at this tier are highly flawed. If you’ve done your work this year, you’re unlikely to write a 3, even under time constraints; even if you’ve neglected a lot of the prep, you’d need to make a series of mistakes and miscalculations to end up here.

With all 3s, it’s still possible to pass. You’d need 40+ correct on Section I. You could get a 4, if you were perfect or nearly perfect (53+), but it matters most that you know a 3 is possible.

As you settle in on the day of the exam to work your way through Section I and Section II, keep all this in mind. You have the scoring guidelines for the 2017 exam (and might be able to access a copy of them through this link at the College Board’s website), so you should already have studied what constitutes the different levels of each essay’s rubric.

More importantly, you’ve been using our course’s scoring mechanisms all year. You know that a 6 is adequate, but not at all flawless; you know that 5s are limited, but have some strengths; you know that 4s fail to meet some basic requirements of the task. There’s a logic to this kind of scale. You can predict, therefore, what your score on Section I needs to be for you to hit your target goals, based on what you are likely to do Section II.

Ask any questions below. We’ll workshop the released free-response questions from last week’s exam tomorrow in class.

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