Last Friday, I was chatting with two seniors about everything and nothing: college, mostly, and the therapeutic benefits of shredding the daily stream of letters that come our way.  (Clicking mark as read in my inbox is nowhere near as thrilling.)  In our endless topical meandering, our sarcasm coalesced around the AP US History exams:  “You should have started studying for them yesterday – as in last week.”

The truth of the matter is that the most effort I’ve given towards the exam has been showing up to class.  This opens up a rather disconcerting stream of thought: is success in class alone conducive to success on the exam – and if so, how explicitly calibrated has our work been towards the AP exam at all?

“Success” is a bit too ambiguous – I’d  think a C in the course and sitting for the exam as more a matter of endurance than anything – so a glance at the statistics may help come to a consensus: Last year, 333,562 students took the AP US History exam.  The average score was a 2.75 and the distribution for grades was:(11.1%), (19.9%), (22.2%), (26.2%), and (20.6%) for fives through ones respectively.  (See College Board).

Its worth asking what the scores denote: a 5 student is “extremely well qualified,” a 4 “well qualified,” a 3 “qualified,” a 2 “possibly qualified,” and a 1 “not qualified.” (See course information).  Ideally, the distribution in class grades would be calibrated as closely as possible to end results – in turn, demanding a grading policy and rigor as precise as possible.

At the desks

Anecdotal evidence of class performance would seem to have us distributed fairly well into five “packs” – but that by no means is a guarantee of a similar performance on the exam.  Would encouraging transparency about the correlations between each teacher’s class grades and student exam performance be worthwhile?  Asides from ending debate over which teacher is more or less rigorous, would it be a useful guide in determining  our own studies outside of class?

First, what have we done in class?  At this point, we have taken at least one full selected-response section of the AP exam, practiced at some point with the library’s practice tests, and many of our quiz questions (let alone the ACE Quizzes) are taken from past exams.  It’s in the essays – document-based or free-response – where we’re seeing the clearest calibration between AP distributions and teacher’s scores.  Eights, and nines are all but “impossible”- sixes and sevens initially exceptional, and the vast majority (if not initially, totality) less than a five.  That the grading is realistic is all well and good, but how about the upward mobility in scores?  One should ask more than are we writing enough – but are we as students criticizing our work intensely enough to be able to come to an internal sense of what differentiates a superb from a traditional essay?

Most of the frustration we’ve encountered is the clash between circling a Scantron and thinking – we’re more than capable of knowing when to guess, and are beginning to grasp AP-specific techniques, especially in terms of conceptualizing our essays.  But what more can we do outside of class – assuming that it’s worth doing in the first place?

To each his own

The College Board says that “to score a grade of 3 or above, you need to answer about 60 percent of the multiple-choice questions correctly – and write acceptable essays in the free-response section.”  When we took the full response segment of the exam, I scored a 68%.  Today, I went to the Calvert Library’s website and navigated over to their databases section where they have a subscription to LearnATest – which houses practice tests and courses from the AP US History exam, SAT, ACT, and other diagnostics, available for free from home to library card members.  (You can register for a library card here.) 

Undeniably less attentive – part aversion to concentrating on a computer and part Counting Crows – I scored a 68%: 55 correct, 20 wrong, and 5 skipped (with no desire to turn back).  LearnATest keeps a record of your past scores as well as your responses to each question in addition to an explanation for each incorrect answer. For me, slavery and reconstruction, seem to be the areas where I need to be focusing my most attention.

This is particularly telling because the College Board says that 45% of questions on the exam cover the years 1790 to 1914 (20 percent of the questions on the exam cover the period to 1789, and 35 percent cover 1915 to the present).  Further, “within those time periods, 35 percent of the questions are on political institutions, behavior, and public policy; 40 percent are about social and cultural developments; approximately 15 percent of the remaining questions cover diplomacy and international relations; and 10 percent cover economic developments.”

Let’s talk

Since this morning, I’ve already gone on to get together the timeline and purpose of the Missouri Compromise, Wilmot Proviso, and Compromise of 1850.  I’m thinking that I’ll log on to LearnATest every other weekend – and am especially interested in getting some experience with the ACT.  It’s worth asking: should our teachers encourage us to take these tests outside of school  -perhaps offering extra credit for doing so?  This in turn requires us to return to the nature of grading policies: undeniably there is an incentive to keep grades high (not only for perceptions and willingness of students to enroll, but also in maintaining the morale of students already enrolled).  This, of course, was the purpose of the curve – but if an argument could be made that regular exposure to the AP exam boosted scores, wouldn’t it be worthwhile to offer a direct bonus for students who took the practice tests?  (The better with which to align the higher exam grades, of course.)

May is a good way out – and there’s plenty of time to bridge the gap between what we haven’t learned yet as well as review and get a sense of how much we retained.  In the end, its a matter of “known knowns and unknown unknowns”: we can only learn when we know what we don’t know.