How to Take an AP Multiple Choice Quiz
At the end of the year, every kid who takes AP Lang will most likely take the AP Lang Exam to test the knowledge they gained. However, throughout the year these students will take small portions of past Exams as periodic evaluations of the student's progress. These "AP multiple choice quizzes" are timed, fairly difficult, and hard to study for. Yet not only can they often have a great impact on your quarter grade, they can also prepare you for the AP Exam at the end of the year, which by passing can earn you college credit for taking the course in high school. Learning how to do well on these quizzes is critical to both your learning and your grade, so here's some tips.
At the end of one semester of AP Lang I have taken many multiple choice quizzes, both at home and in class. As the year has progressed I have varied in my quiz scores, but overall they have improved, as has my comfortably with taking them. The first thing to remember is that these quizzes are timed, and even if you are at home you should probably time yourself to get an accurate judgement of well you are doing. On average each question on the quiz adds a minute and six seconds- a ten question quiz would take eleven minutes- according to Mrs. Blankenship. This time includes the time you must take to read the passage that goes with each quiz, which can eat up a considerable amount of time. Here is an example of a passage by Ralph Waldo Emerson my class had to take a quiz to for homework. See how long it takes you to read it:
Promptly read, this passage may take you two and a half minutes to read; that leaves you with eight and a half minutes to answer ten questions. But how much of the passage did you really absorb? Many of the questions will require you to go back and read the text over again, killing even more time. This is the common problem AP Lang students who want a good grade face.
In order to fix this, I usually skip passages of this size entirely and read the first question right as the quiz begins. If this question asks for an overall tone, argument, or something that would require a full reading of the passage, I move on to the next question. I keep moving on until I reach the first question on a specific few sentences or part of a paragraph- something that won't take me long to read. The questions are usually ordered chronologically, so this means that the first specific question should be from the beginning of the passage, and the last specific question will be from the end. By the time I finish all the specific questions, I've ended up reading a good portion of the passage.
Nice. NOW I can go back and answer the overall questions. If it asks something about overall tone, I'll know about that because I just spent the last six or so minutes partially reading the passage; I could even keep these more general questions in the back of my head while I'm reading the passage to answer the more specific ones. This way I save time that might otherwise be wasted reading and rereading passages word for word.
But before I even walk into the quiz, I can also do a bit of studying. I can review my vocab terms so that I know what the questions are referring to. But the most important thing I can do is look over past practice multiple choice quizzes.
Have you ever thought, wow, the only reason I got that wrong was because I just don't think in those terms, while the test-writers do. Well that's a nice little thing to make yourself feel better, but it's not going to help you get a better score. By going over questions you got wrong on past quizzes, however, you can better understand how the test-writers think- for example, AP Lang test-writers are very specific and do everything for a purpose, so if most of an answer looks right except for one part, don't think they were just being ambivalent. They probably did that purposefully to trick you. These little thought processes will help you better get into the mind of an AP Lang Exam writer, and help you do better on the multiple choice quizzes.
Nice. NOW I can go back and answer the overall questions. If it asks something about overall tone, I'll know about that because I just spent the last six or so minutes partially reading the passage; I could even keep these more general questions in the back of my head while I'm reading the passage to answer the more specific ones. This way I save time that might otherwise be wasted reading and rereading passages word for word.
But before I even walk into the quiz, I can also do a bit of studying. I can review my vocab terms so that I know what the questions are referring to. But the most important thing I can do is look over past practice multiple choice quizzes.
Have you ever thought, wow, the only reason I got that wrong was because I just don't think in those terms, while the test-writers do. Well that's a nice little thing to make yourself feel better, but it's not going to help you get a better score. By going over questions you got wrong on past quizzes, however, you can better understand how the test-writers think- for example, AP Lang test-writers are very specific and do everything for a purpose, so if most of an answer looks right except for one part, don't think they were just being ambivalent. They probably did that purposefully to trick you. These little thought processes will help you better get into the mind of an AP Lang Exam writer, and help you do better on the multiple choice quizzes.
No comments:
Post a Comment