AP scores are due out in about a week--there's a rolling schedule for their release this year, but we'll get ours here in Florida on the morning of the 10th--so I thought I might say a few things before they are made public.
2.
First, it's of course important to remember that these scores represent only each student's performance on a specific set of tasks on a single day. Especially in today's culture, where tests are high-stakes and performance on tests is often looked at as "the answer" in education, it's important to remember that these scores aren't a measure of personal worth. They aren't a measure of everything a student did or didn't learn in a particular class. And they aren't, by themselves, a measure of the quality of teaching.
They are, simply, each student's performance on a specific set of tasks on a single day. And, I might add, students are performing these tasks, as we often remind ourselves at the Reading, under duress and with tight time constraints.
3.
I hope we can agree about that. But I also hope that we can agree that while we shouldn't take these scores too seriously in the wrong way, we should take them very seriously in the right way. Especially when taken in aggregate, student performance on these exams can tell us a great deal about our own teaching, and about the teaching that's taking place in classrooms far and wide.
4.
All of the prompts I worked on except the operational prompt (based on an engaging passage from Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods) are confidential, but I don't think the fine folks at the College Board and ETS would mind if I told you that although the prompts are different, the student responses on the confidential exams are comparable, both in character and quality, to those on the operational exam.
5.
What became to clear to me, looking at a large number of samples of student writing, is that the exam's growth over the last several years is remarkable, and that students from a wide range of backgrounds continue to do well--some of them so well that I hope I could do as much, given the time constraints of the exam.
6.
It also became clear that many students demonstrate success in naming or identifying features of text, but that too many of them stop there, and in so doing, they stop short of doing the work of rhetorical analysis. These students' responses suggest the need for additional instruction and practice in explaining how a particular feature of a text is effective for its audience and situation and in articulating why a particular strategy is employed by a writer to achieve an effect--in short, students need to make sure that they provide clear and effective explanations that connect the features of a text to its meaning and purpose.
7.
I'm not leading an AP Summer Institute, but if I were, I'd spend a lot of time making sure that teachers move their instruction away from the teaching of rhetorical terminology and toward the teaching of rhetorical analysis, toward the teaching of how language is used in particular situations by particular speakers to achieve particular effects with particular audiences. Simply put, I'd suggest that instead of teaching students to identify anaphora and polysyndeton, we should spend that time teaching students to use the phrase in order to.
8.
That said, I hope my students did well, and I'm (of course) excited (and perhaps just a little anxious) to see the results, but I'm already working on plans for next year. We're well into our summer reading--next year's students just submitted essays on Brave New World, and they're beginning their reading of Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death this week.
9.
Also, fourteen days was a mighty long time to be in Louisville for this year's Reading, but this view from the hotel room over the Ohio River didn't hurt.
10.
And also, in the spirit of legal disclaimers, I should probably tell you that these opinions are my own, and they are not necessarily shared by the College Board or ETS, who will offer their official analysis of this year's exam in the fall.
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