Sisyphean High: Language and Composition



SHEET 1: EXAM OVERVIEWMultiple Choice?Free Response?AP TOTAL???Weighted?Q1Q2Q3Weighted?Composite#A-FA note on how you will be scored in May by the College Board: For the first time, students will not be penalized for wrong answers on the multiple-choice section of the exam. The quarter-point penalty has been removed. This means that there is no benefit to leaving a question blank. For your practice exam, I used the old formula: a point for each correct answer, a quarter-point off for each incorrect answer, and no penalty for omissions. Use your copy of the scoring calculus for more information.You began this practice exam on Thursday, January 20, writing FR2 in class. Eleven days later, on Monday, January 31, you began the multiple-choice section; three days after that, on Thursday, February 3, you completed it. You annotated the sources for FR1 on Friday the 4th; on Monday, three days later, you wrote the essay itself. Then you finished your practice exam, writing FR3 on Tuesday, February 8. It took nearly three weeks to get through the three hours of the test.To call that a strange test-taking situation would be a bit of an understatement—and then we have the unexpected (for you) multiple-choice work you completed on Thursday, February 10, which was folded into the score reports before you now. It would be easy to take that bizarre narrative, with its apocalyptic weather and slapstick scheduling, and discount the exam entirely. Certainly, you should—and will—consider that narrative as part of your performance. But the point of this practice exam is, in fact, right there in the adjective: It was practice. This was a diagnostic, meant to generate our focus for the next three months. I give the same exam every year—the same multiple-choice passages and questions, the same prompts, the same metacognitive and collaborative follow-up—because there is no secret or trick to it. The purpose is to see how you might perform on a real exam, and, therefore, to see what I might be able to do to help. Even allowing for the desultory production, however, we have a lot to make sense of. Overall and collectively, there should be a correlation between MC and FR scores, and there isn’t one here.First, the scores. On the left, you have the multiple-choice section scores: number correct (?), number incorrect (?), and number omitted (?). The weighted score is next. For the free responses, you have your score out of nine, followed by the weighted total. (FYI: Each essay was scored twice by me, once immediately after you wrote it and once two weeks later in a blind check; many essays were also spot-checked anonymously by teachers trained in how to score them.) The composite score is out of 150; your score out of five follows from that; and, finally, you were given a scaled score out of 100, which was then curved six points.Second, the metacognitive narrative. During the third quarter, you will weave a narrative—the story of you taking this exam during the worst winter in recent memory—into a metacognitive analysis of your performance. You will explain and analyze the data, top to bottom, while retelling your experience, start to finish; as you write, you will explore your strengths and weaknesses, offering a sense of how this exam reflects your work during the first semester, as well as how it will be part of your continual growth during the second semester.To belabor that last sentence a bit, let me stress that this is much more than just data analysis. You are to consider your performance in Q1 and Q2 (ignoring the extraordinary boost I gave your averages at the end of Q2), beginning with specific categories of assignments, viz.: MC, QORAS, FR, reflection, revision, discussion. Does your exam performance match these other performances? Get a bit of distance from yourself here, see yourself as a student with real strengths and weaknesses, and recognize that I’m not looking for a particular answer from you. I’m looking for you to answer difficult, complicated questions, like How does this exam reflect my ability to think, read, and write? and To what extent did I engage with the specific ideas and authors on the exam? You are not offering excuses or leaping through loopholes.The shape of this narrative is up to you, and you will have several chances to workshop it with me and your peers during Q3. My suggestion is to begin at the beginning: How will you approach this kind of open-ended, data-intensive, and personal writing? Will you have a thesis to argue, or will you attempt to convey some essential understanding? Will you open with an image, perhaps of you waking up to fresh snow, or with an expository overview of the exam?One more note: If you are one of the few students whose student number has incomplete data next to it (indicated by an asterisk), you need to see me.SHEET 2: MULTIPLE-CHOICESection I GradesPassage 452/10 TotalRaw %W. %Points?%OE?Dif.?%MC +/-The usual process of reviewing the multiple-choice section of this practice exam is exhaustive and collaborative— exploration through a wiki, perhaps, or an adversarial series of blog posts. The irregularities here prevent us from taking the usual approach. Here are the correct answers, just to get that out of the way:PASSAGE 1PASSAGE 2PASSAGE 3PASSAGE 41. Answer = (D)13. Answer = (C)29. Answer = (C)44. Answer = (C)2. Answer = (A)14. Answer = (E)30. Answer = (B)45. Answer = (B)3. Answer = (A)15. Answer = (E)31. Answer = (B)46. Answer = (D)4. Answer = (D)16. Answer = (B)32. Answer = (A)47. Answer = (A)5. Answer = (E)17. Answer = (E)33. Answer = (E)48. Answer = (A)6. Answer = (B)18. Answer = (A)34. Answer = (E)49. Answer = (C)7. Answer = (A)19. Answer = (B)35. Answer = (D)50. Answer = (D)8. Answer = (C)20. Answer = (C)36. Answer = (C)51. Answer = (B)9. Answer = (C)21. Answer = (E)37. Answer = (C)52. Answer = (A)10. Answer = (B)22. Answer = (A)38. Answer = (E)53. Answer = (B)11. Answer = (A)23. Answer = (A)39. Answer = (D)54. Answer = (E)12. Answer = (E)24. Answer = (A)40. Answer = (C)25. Answer = (D)41. Answer = (D)26. Answer = (A)42. Answer = (D)27. Answer = (C)43. Answer = (A)28. Answer = (B)On this particular MC section, the average student over the last four or five years gets 30 of those correct, misses 13, and leaves 11 blank. Until now, the highest score ever on this portion of the diagnostic exam—and the highest total ever on practice exams in either AP English course—was 50 correct with four wrong, from a girl who also wrote a 7 and 8 on the FR section, and whose performance in class was equally remarkable. (Two things, though: She took this diagnostic in March, not January, and she was lucky enough to have a lab period every other day, effectively giving her an extra ten classes a month.) Usually, the high end for MC is 40 correct, with 10-14 wrong and a handful of omissions.This year, the average scores are roughly the same: 32 correct, 15 wrong, seven omitted. But the highest and lowest scores are outside of the usual standard deviation:Highest number correct, Pareto set A = {38, 39, 41, 41, 44, 45, 45, 46, 47, 51, 53, 53}Lowest number correct, Pareto set B = {17, 17, 17, 18, 19, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 21, 21}The weighted percentage of points earned runs from 15 to 98. To generate more data, you were given two more multiple-choice passages on February 10. The first piece that day was rearranged from the exam; that fourth passage is where students tend to run out of time or steam, so you deserved a second shot at it. Your performance is separated here, with your original score (OE?) next to your second score. As you reflect, note that there are obvious reasons for your performance to improve, but not many valid reasons it would go down.The second passage given to you is referred to here as Passage 5. It is roughly as difficult as the passages on the practice exam, so there should be a strong correlation between how you performed overall on the MC and how you performed there. The difference between the two is indicated last. Here are the correct answers:52. Answer = (A)55. Answer = (A)58. Answer = (C)53. Answer = (E)56. Answer = (A)59. Answer = (D)54. Answer = (D)57. Answer = (B)60. Answer = (E)SHEET 3: FREE RESPONSE ESSAYSSection II Grades (Raw)?Section II Grades (%)Q1Q2Q3Total?Q1Q2Q3Total %The raw scores here are part of how your score is calculated, but they aren’t anything more than your original score (out of nine) multiplied by 3.0556. The percentages are derived from this, but there’s no mystery here; if you did well, you did well. What I’d like to offer instead is a bit of perspective: A score of five is good here, and one of six is great; anything higher is phenomenal. With the average score on Section I (30-13-11), all fives would come out to a three overall.You have exemplars for each of the FR prompts, which means you have a baseline for effective (the eight), adequate (the six), and inadequate (the three or four, depending). Compare your writing to these to isolate differences and/or similarities that will help you improve in future responses. Use the rubrics, too, to evaluate your work. Copy over the exact language for the score you earned. There are various reasons an essay is scored the way it is, and you should work to determine the elements of your essay that match that rubric’s guidelines. Use our DAMAGES work to focus you further.FR1: Synthesis. The average scores here (P7, 4.2; P8, 4.5) are a little low. Speaking generally, you struggled with the primary skill of synthesis (and the one we spent our time studying in class): the use of the sources. Look in your response for sources that are used glancingly and poorly; without a strong sense of the synthesis material, you tended to rely on unsubstantiated statements, broad generalities, misreadings, and misunderstandings.But all of that dodges the real concern: We spent the first two months of class discussing and dissecting public education, and this prompt is built on those concepts. You should have knocked this out of the park. The prompt asks you to “evaluate the most important factors that a school should consider before using particular technologies in curriculum and instruction,” which also outlines your writing in one sentence:evaluate = accept, reject, or qualify; determine efficacy; assess effectiveness (MEANING)most important factors = relative value; compare/contrast; sequence; classify and divide (ARRANGEMENT)particular technologies = specific tech; examples from sources; examples from your education (DETAIL)curriculum and instruction = specific goals of education; lessons; skills and knowledge (DETAIL/MEANING)This begs for an interesting, complex argument of value, and on a topic as pertinent to your real lives—not the manufactured, disconnected lives you sometimes lead at school, but your real lives—as anything you are likely to see on an exam.FR2: Rhetorical Analysis. The average scores here: 3.7 in P7; 4.3 in P8. Nationally, this FR produced one of the lowest means ever, largely due to students misreading “want” as desire, not lack; apart from this, unfortunately, many of your responses are structurally, conceptually, and compositionally flawed. The vast majority of our work in Q1 and Q2 was geared toward rhetorical analysis. Each MC exercise or set of QORAS honed this skill; massive blog posts and sets of general commentary refined it; and more than half of your writing assignments were built around rhetorical analysis and understanding. In fact, the emulative exercise we spent the most time on—the one utilizing Oppenheimer as a source—was built around parallelism and concatenation, and Hazlitt does exactly the same thing.Which is to say that you were primed to do well on this. You were given a difficult passage for which you had been extensively prepared; doing passably well on it would have been a huge boost to your sense of self-efficacy. Instead, you stumbled through the simplest skills we’ve practiced, like pronoun-antecedent recognition, and abandoned the suggested essay structures and style we’ve emphasized all year.FR3: General Argument. On the type of writing we practiced least, you did fairly well, averaging 5.1 in P7 and 5.2 in P8. You had a few collective deficiencies in logic and support, but these were overall insightful and reasonable responses to Singer’s enthymeme, or argument in brief. We will study his argument more thoroughly soon, which will allow us to return to your work here. Let’s move on for now.SHEET 3 (CONTINUED): SECTIONS I AND II COMPARISONI/II Dif.RAAllThis last column highlights any discrepancy between your performance on the MC and FR sections. But let me reiterate, before we look at the numbers, that this metacognitive narrative is not about defending yourself from some imagined charge. It is about exploring and explicating your performance; moreover, it is about squeezing every last drop of insight out of all this data.Start with your response to FR2 and the MC section, which are closely correlated assessments. Each tests the skills of close reading and rhetorical analysis through a wide variety of texts—anything from satire in The Onion to archaic philosophy. The first column here (“RA”) shows the absolute value of the difference between your FR2 and MC scores. Anything above 10 is statistically significant; anything around or above 20 is statistically troubling; anything around or above 30 is statistically improbable; and as we go up, the discrepancy becomes more and more disconcerting and unlikely. We have scores here as high as 75. If there is an explanation, your metacognitive narratives should find it.The second correlative datum here is the discrepancy between your performance on Section I and Section II overall (“All”). Of course, good writers aren’t always good readers, and it is possible to perform well on multiple-choice exams without performing as well on timed responses (or vice versa); furthermore, a practice exam as beleaguered by scheduling changes and interruptions as this one just might produce a greater discrepancy than normal. It is your job to determine where the line was shifted. The correlation between MC and FR performances is so strong that there is a computerized system for the AP exam in May that flags your exam, if, after any FR is scored, your MC score does not match up. It is unlikely that any student would get 50 questions correct on the MC section, then score a three on FR2. And the usual explanations do not apply to your practice work.You have the same statistical warnings here: anything above 10 is a concern; anything above 20-25 deserves considerable analysis. Isolate where your performance was stronger, looking for important reasons why that was—that is, not reasons related to the weather, your empty stomach, or your crush on the student to your left. You must determine the how and why of these performances, and the more specific and insightful you can be, the more you will help yourself. The goal is still to use these exams as a diagnostic; the role of diagnostician has simply shifted from me to you.A final note and introductionThis explanation of your exam data is uniquely yours; in the past, I have given students a lengthier and perhaps sterner response, replete with jeremiads and exhortations. Because I would like you to see how circumstances shift my own use of rhetoric (and because you have already received your fair share of jeremiads and exhortations), I have edited and printed that second response. I suggest that you read it, since it contains useful information and feedback about the exam in general; it has also been edited to address your work directly, albeit with a different tone. Keep the rhetorical purpose of these missives in mind, of course, and treat them as opportunities to learn a few things.Oh, and if you haven’t been doing it, read the footnotes. You never know what I’ve hidden down there, and you ought to get in the habit of reading that kind of thing, anyway; the AP exam has had a habit over the last two years of sneaking questions about footnotes and annotations (for example, that ibid. refers in annotations, footnotes, bibliographies, etc. to a book, article, chapter, or page previously cited) onto the multiple-choice section. ................
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