There's most certainly room for improvement when it comes to AP tests, and the AP Literature exam, is no exception. My greatest strength in literature is my broad knowledge of history and my passion for it. In some instances, this pre-historical jargon well help to expand the picture and limit the ambiguity of a question. I could improve on many things in relation to my analysis skills. I have a decent understanding of factual questions, but I could use major improvement on technical and analytical, and a major overhaul on my inferential skills.
Therefore, I'm looking forward to improving my comprehension of a literary piece while focusing on improved technical and analytical skills. These include but are not limited to parallel structure, paradox, organization, literary devices, rhetoric, diction, and syntax. I specifically would like to understand how to analyze and interpret parallel structure. It is concept that I'm not too familiar, and would like to have a handle on. Identifying a paradox is also something I would like to be able to learn. I also need to help in identifying how point of view can impact the complexity of an author's work.
The extension to a literary text helps to provide a deeper interpretation of a text. Having a good understanding of historical context of the time era that the text was written in will help dramatically in making these connections. I'm setting a goal of how to meet the inferential questions which often have ambiguity. To do this, I must focus on tone, theme, diction, purpose, and implications by the main speakers.
I'm also setting a goal of improving my time on tests, so as to improve my test takings skills. I will accomplish this by perfecting the POE (Process of Elimination) so that I can limit ambiguity and the difficulty of choosing answers on tests. I need to know how to eliminate wrong choices, narrow and or broad answers, and illogical answers. I will also pledge to improve my close reading skills on tests. I have done a great job of close reading these past summer reading text's with post it notes, and I will continue to underline words and phrases that match important context and analysis.
As another personal goal, I need to expand out to my classmates. I need to verbally interact with them to understand their thoughts and analysis of textual information. When I can do this, I can gain valuable insight into how others analyze a text, maybe in such a way that I can become better with a knowledge of their analysis tools and insight.
Insight is key to forward bettering your knowledge into any subject. I feel as if you have a very thought out plan in writing this. You stayed constant, kept me informed, and most of all I was wanting to hear more of your plans of improvement. Your usage of personal observations really gave me a way to see things through your eyes. I believe you have done very well explaining your plans on improving your AP score.
ReplyDeleteAlex,
ReplyDeleteI can very much relate to your post. After taking the practice test, we all faced the question of “how can we prepare for the challenge of improving our test scores?” You answered this by first identifying your strengths and weaknesses and then outlining a plan to improve AP Literature multiple choice test score by enhancing your literary comprehension. One thing that surprised me was that you have “[a] broad knowledge of history and … pre-historical jargon” but you struggled with the inferential questions. This was the opposite of my test performance as I struggled the most with the jargon questions. What stood out to me the most about your post were the creative solutions to improve your score. For example, reaching out to your classmates for help in understanding the analysis of literature has the potentially to be particularly helpful. This is because the comparison of ideas lies at the top of Blooms Taxonomy since it is a form of evaluation. Personally, I have always thought that working with others helps in understanding difficult topics. Another facet of your plan was the focus on improving your time management by reducing the time spent on each question through process of elimination. I think that this will be an approach that I will use since it can help limit the ambiguity of inferential questions. One aspect that I think could help you with your preparation is to learn the 5 standard multiple-choice question types so that when you are reading the passage you can look for significant tone changes, rhetorical devices, etc. Another strategy that may help you is to take a full length practice every month and compare your scores. I find that the only way to determine if you have improved at something is to try it again, and compare your performance to your past attempts. Lastly, as we seem to be better in different parts of the multiple-choice test we can help each other with literary analysis and interpretation to improve our scores.
Good luck, and great post!