<p>A thread for eager AP English students</p>
<p>How tough is this class at your school?</p>
<p>What is everyone doing this summer to prepare for the class?</p>
<p>AP English Language difficulty depends on the student almost completely. This is because you won’t really learn anything new just refine your writing and composition techniques. Over the summer it might be wise to grab a vocabulary workshop or SAT vocab book and learn some of that. It would also help to learn rhetorical devices and do summer reading.</p>
<p>Well over the summer, my teacher is having us annotate 2 books, but that’s about it</p>
<p>So far I haven’t heard of any summer assignments…I am confident that I will have summer work, I just don’t know what. </p>
<p>This is going to be the first year that this class is offered in my school. I took it to challenge myself, but mostly to improve my writing skills.</p>
<p>@151Andrew151 You might want to check your school website. My teacher didn’t tell anybody and we were expected to look there ourselves. It was pretty bad when only two students had their summer work done with over 75 taking the class.</p>
<p>@jimmyboy23 it stinks because they don’t know which teacher is going to be teaching the course yet, so they haven’t assigned summer work. </p>
<p>@jimmyboy23 any idea how difficult the AP exam is?</p>
<p>That was the same situation I was in.</p>
<p>Like I said in the first post it is about the student. If you are good at writing essays and read at a high (college) level, then it should be okay. The problem is that there is no information to memorize and pick up points that way like there is in science and history APs. That also makes it impossible to cram for; it is more of a gradual process to prepare for this exam. Overall, I would say if you are an above average student then a 4 is definitely obtainable, but only people who put in the work and develop a flair in their writing will achieve a 5. That’s also another thing, some believe they are naturally bad writers, but that’s not true. They just need to spend more time with it. “perfect practice makes perfect”. Overall the exam was kind of middle of the road not difficult but not easy either. </p>
<p>@jimmyboy23 Since you already took the exam, are the prompts like what you would get with the SAT’s</p>
<p>No, because the essays for this exam are always based on some other reading. For the synthesis essay you get 10 documents and write an essay based on those. For the rhetorical analysis essay you get about a page long speech and write an essay based on the rhetorical techniques that were present and why the author or speaker included them. The argument essay is closest to the SAT essay because it asks basically the same thing. </p>
<p>AP differs from SAT in that the SAT essay is broken to the point where people can come in with a pre-written essay and know after 25 minutes that they scored a 12. This is mainly due to the SAT’s need to be relevant and politically correct towards everyone in the country. This is why there are only about ten to twenty different prompts the SAT can use. AP is college level and therefore assumes maturity from the test takers and can delve into more topics and deeper in depth. Remember that the SAT tests you as a high school junior. The AP test tests you at the college freshman level. The prompts are more sophisticated and they expect the responses to be as well. </p>
<p>@jimmyboy23 thanks for the heads up! Did you find that Barron’s was a good review book? Or did you find something that you liked more?</p>
<p>I didn’t use a review book personally. All I did was do the in-class cliff notes tests that my teacher gave the class. I think a review book is unnecessary for this exam unless if you can find an old edition of barron’s on amazon for like $7. I would recommend taking a practice test from either the course description on collegeboard or the released 1990s exam forum here on CC (you can also google more released exams if you know the year of the test). That will give you a good measure of how much you need a review book. The good thing about Lang is that you already know 80% of the information so you can start taking practice tests before you start the class. If you get more than 50% on the multiple choice of the practice test then that means a review book would be unnecessary, helpful for maybe getting from a 4 to a 5 but not really worth reading through 250 pages of a barron’s book.</p>
<p>I’m taking this course next year 
. People who receive As in the class receive a 4 or 5 on the exam . My summer assignment is to write an essay about the overuse of the word like . However I feel like that it like might be like challenging because I like love the word like 
. ( I do realize that sentence before this sounds illiterate but it was a joke lol </p>
<p>@Kitsyxoxo Sounds like a cool prompt! How often do you think we will have to write essays? Every week?</p>
<p>Probably @151Andrew151 </p>
<p>I’m actually very nervous for this class. The difficulty at my school also depends on the teacher. One has a very manageable class and the other grades pretty tough and keeps you on your toes with the workload. I would like to improve my writing but I always struggle in understanding what teachers want when it comes to writing an essay. I despise analytical essays the most but I know these are important skills to learn. </p>