Preparing For the AP English Literature Test

As I write this, it’s six weeks until the AP Lit exam. This is usually when AP teachers start worrying about their students’ performance on the test, which often (unfairly) reflects on us. While it’s true we’re tasked to prepare students for the exam, we must also prepare them for college and their lives beyond this stage. We also must battle truancy, plagiarism and AI issues, senioritis, and lingering Covid-era issues. Test prep is just one more thing to stress about.

If you were to ask me what my test prep looks like, I think you’d be disappointed. I only do 2-3 days of direct test prep in the days leading up to the exam. However, this is because so much of my year-long activities are directly prepping for the exam.

But in order to help new and stressed AP Lit teachers out there, I’m taking a different approach to helping with test prep. Here is a list of different elements of the AP Lit Exam that you could prepare for, with my opinion on how important that task actually is. Remember that my students are not your students, so ultimately prepare however works best for you!

If you’re searching for test prep materials, check out my TpT store where I have dozens of no-prep, customizable resources you can use. I’ll link to resources that can help to specific needs, as well as some free resources and blog posts that you can access right away!

Studying the Rubric – HIGH Priority

I think this is a hugely underutilized skill, both in test prep and in education in general. Too many students don’t look at the rubric before submitting an assignment. For students to score well on the free response questions, it is imperative that they know how they are graded. This goes beyond point values (1/4/1) and includes learning the criterial needed to get top scores on each poetry, prose, and open question.

For example, for Evidence and Commentary on the open question, students must “provide specific evidence to support all claims in a line of reasoning” and “explain how some the evidence supports a line of reasoning” to earn 3/4 points. However, on the poetry and prose essays, they must do this AND “explain how at least one literary element or technique of the poem contributes to its meaning.” Students that don’t know this requirement could seriously limit their potential score if they don’t go out of their way to analyze literary techniques in FRQs 1 & 2. Yet, it isn’t a requirement for FRQ 3. This also means that students have more freedom to analyze theme and complexity for FRQ 3, since they won’t have to go out of their way to identify literary elements.

Too many students score 2s rather than 3s because they approach each essay with a one-size-fits-all rubric in mind. Knowing the subtle differences in the FRQ rubrics can help students score best on each essay and boost their overall score.

For help teaching the rubrics, I recommend my Understanding the Rubric lesson, available on TpT. This is also part of the AP Lit Test Prep bundle, available in the same place.

Reviewing the Test Format – MEDIUM Priority

As a high school senior, I took the AP Lit Exam. However, because we were on semester blocks, I got the “remix” version of the class. Suddenly it was test day, and I had no idea what to expect. (To be fair, I was a part-time listener, so I may have been told about the test format and just wasn’t listening.) In short, you’ll want to warn students about what to expect, and you’ll probably want to do it more than once.

Even though I go over this many times throughout the year, I always spend a few minutes reviewing the test format. To do this in a succinct way, I have created a Kahoot that covers the test’s format, strategies, and main literary elements. Feel free to use this with your own students!

Reviewing Lit Terms – MEDIUM Priority

The importance of literary terms in preparation for the AP Lit exam has gone down drastically since the 2019 update. Before that, there were several multiple-choice questions devoted purely to obscure literary terms, so students needed to study hundreds of them to even have a chance on these questions. However, the new CED only address 31 literary terms directly. These are the only terms that students must know, as they could have multiple choice terms referring to their definitions.

Does this mean you shouldn’t teach literary terms? Absolutely not. In fact, as said above, they’re required for high-scoring essays in prose and poetry analysis. However, the “drill and kill” method for teaching vocabulary is not very effective for use in written analysis. I prefer spending time on literary terms in an isolated setting, learning about the effect and purpose of each term through examples. My students do this through bellringers, available here if you’re interested in integrating them.

AP Classroom Practice – LOW Priority

I’m going to get some flak for this one, especially since I created the study documents that pair with the 2020 test prep videos. But I think the AP Classroom progress checks are more trouble than their worth. Don’t get me wrong, the multiple-choice questions are very helpful, as are the practice FRQs. But AP Classroom is a mess. The website is frequently offline, has inconsistent difficulty settings, and provides an incredibly complicated user experience. I struggled with it for a year and a half and then gave up.

That being said, I do use their multiple-choice quizzes as multiple-choice practice in my classes (see below). I also like that the progress checks can show students what skills they struggle with. However, I feel like my students can usually pinpoint their weaknesses on their own, rather than taking a series of annoying online quizzes. I’ve created a graphic organizer for each AP Lit Essential Skill. As the test approaches, I’ll pass out the appropriate graphic organizer to each student, regardless of the text we’re studying. To learn more about these skill-based organizers, check them out in my TpT store.

Poetry Analysis – HIGH Priority

Please hear me shouting this—DO NOT LEAVE POETRY TO THE LAST MINUTE! Students and teachers often forget that poetry is not just about an essay. 50% of the multiple-choice questions are based on poetry analysis as well, so truly students should spend 35-50% of their class time in AP Lit in poetry study.

Luckily, there is an endless supply of great poems out there on any topic under the sun. There are a lot of ways to teach poetry, but the critical thing is to expose students to poetry regularly. Weekly (or even daily!) poetry analysis takes the fear factor away and students won’t feel so uncertain on the AP Lit exam.

Vocabulary Review – LOW Priority

My answer here is similar to what I said on literary terms (see above). When I talk about vocabulary, I don’t mean literary terms specific to AP Lit. I’m talking about domain-specific words to increase a student’s general vocabulary. To do this year-round is a great exercise in strengthening diction and written analysis. But to do it in the weeks before the exam to try and make students “sound smarter” is often a waste of time. Their writing won’t improve too much in the final weeks of April, so I wouldn’t recommend worrying about this.

Long Fiction Plot Review – LOW Priority

Before the 2019 course restructuring, AP Lit used to be very much about the books you taught. It wasn’t rare to hear teachers at the Reading comparing title selections and talking about teaching 8-12 long works per year. However, with the new emphasis on short fiction in the CED, we don’t need to emphasize long fiction as much as we thought. Truly, students only need to know the plot of ONE novel or play, for the open question (Q3). Every other essay and quiz is going to be about analysis of a text that they can’t choose.

To prep for the open essay, students should still have a few titles in their toolkit, ready to analyze. I ask my students to create study guides for five novels or plays, which they review the days leading up to the exam. This helps refresh character names and plot details, so they don’t space during the test. But again, this isn’t a high priority issue.

Excerpt Practice – HIGH Priority

THIS. Excerpt analysis is the most under-emphasized test prep activity.

Let me explain: our students study short stories, poems, plays, and novels in our classes. Most of the time they study them with their peers and participate in whole class discussions, although more of us are shifting towards independent reading. Even so, the students study the work as a whole. However, 35% of the AP Lit test requires students to study an excerpt of a text. With little explanation. Out of context. Often, even the author isn’t explained.

Because of the way the exam emphasizes literary skills rather than test-taking skills, College Board doesn’t really tell teachers how much they need to prepare students for the study of excerpts. But as an AP Lit teacher of almost 20 years, I’m telling you that they need it. This is where multiple choice practice through prose excerpts are helpful. I also have a prose analysis unit that studies excerpts only available in my TpT store. This 1-2 week unit is the third unit my AP Lit students do, but can also be taught as a test prep resource. It’s excellent for teaching students strategies for cold analysis and excerpt dissection.

Multiple Choice Strategies – MEDIUM Priority

No matter where you get your test questions, I do think it is important to review multiple choice strategies with students. If this is a student’s first AP exam, they will be in for a rude awakening when they see College Board’s version of multiple choice. These five-option questions are often an exercise in mind games, manipulated meanings, and finding the rightest answer among several strong options.

Multiple choice practice includes helping students annotate questions and answer options. If you’re looking for some quick strategies for multiple choice analysis, check out this blog post!

Conclusion

I’m sure I missed some things here and I know there will be others who disagree with me. I’d love to hear from you! What are your favorite test prep activities and what questions do you still have? Let me know!