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Changes to the 2007 AP English Language and Composition Exam
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| | Using Sources to Support an Argument
Beginning in fall 2006, the AP English Language and Composition course should highlight research skills that will help align the AP course with first-year courses in college composition. Beginning in 2007, the free-response section of the exam will contain, as one of the three questions, a synthesis essay that asks students to use sources in support of an argument. This question will contain four to seven sources and a prompt that relates to these sources; in general, at least one of these sources will be an image (e.g. photo, cartoon, graph, etc.). Students will be asked to write essays that incorporate at least three to four of the sources into argumentative or analytical responses; the sources will be used to support the student's particular argument or position. An additional fifteen-minute reading time will be added to the exam to accommodate the increased reading load. The revised emphasis of the English Language and Composition course will also be reflected in the multiple choice section of the exam, which will contain questions about documentation or citation found in a passage.
These changes to the exam support the way in which the informed use of research materials and the ability to synthesize varied sources (to evaluate, cite, and utilize source material) should be an integral part of the AP Language and Composition course. Students should move past assignments that allow for the uncritical citation of source material and, instead, take up projects that call on them to evaluate the legitimacy and purpose of sources used. One way to help students synthesize and evaluate texts in this way is the researched argumentative paper.
Researched papers help students to formulate varied, informed arguments. Unlike the traditional research paper, in which works are often not evaluated, the researched paper asks students to consider the source as a text that has a particular audience and purpose in mind. Researched papers remind students that they must sort through disparate interpretations to analyze, reflect upon, and write about a topic.
When students are asked to bring the experience and opinions of others into their essays in this way, they enter into conversations with other writers and thinkers. The results of such conversations are essays that use citations for substance rather than show, for dialogue rather than diatribe.
Students should be expected, too, to expand their notions of text to include visuals. To support the increasing importance of graphics and visual images as texts (a relevance that will be reflected in the use of images in the exam), students should be asked to analyze how such images both relate to written texts and serve as alternative forms of text themselves.
Finally, while there will be no changes to the AP Language and Composition Exam until 2007, teachers should not tell their students to expect a particular pattern or combination of question types in 2005 and 2006. As always, students should be guided to read and respond to the given prompt; coaching students to expect to answer in formulaic ways fundamentally disadvantages them.
- These changes to the course and exam will be announced in a general way in the AP English Course Description: 2006 and in the AP English Language Teacher's Guide.
- The AP English Course Description: May 2007, May 2008 will explain fully all of the revisions to the course and the exam and will include samples of the synthesis essay and the source-based multiple-choice question.
- Changes will be implemented to the AP English Language Exam in 2007.
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