I didn’t study for the AP English Lang test because I didn’t feel it was necessary-- we essentially covered everything in class, and I found it easy to retain. I’m now going into AP English Lit, and I need to know if I should bother getting a review book. Is the same theory true?
@platpifa I took the Lit exam this year and I felt that a review book was completely unnecessary. The only thing you need to “learn” are more lit terms and vocab, and many of them should be review from Lang. For us, we wrote a lot of impromptu and timed essays based off of old AP prompts, and my teacher would go over strategies and organization tips with us and give us sample student responses to read over.
If you’re good at analyzing books and reading passages, you really don’t need anything other than some MC and essay practice, which I’m sure your teacher will provide. As for the open question essay, if you’ve been reading the books you’ve been assigned throughout the year and in the years before you should be totally fine. Only bit of studying I did before the test was glancing over a lit term list and reading over the summary for the great gatsby haha.
Awesome! Less studying for me. Thanks.
Since I did not take an AP Lit class, I looked at old exams to get a sense of format, but did not use a review book. I think my total prep time was maybe an hour. If you did well on AP Lang without prep, you should be fine.
I took the class and the exam last year, but my class never did an actual prep. We read, discussed, and wrote about literature, but we never did any practic MC or free response questions. Of course that varies for each class, but my prep was on my own time. That being said, I didn’t use a specific AP prep book; rather, I wrote practice essays for released free response questions online. I took them one at a time, giving myself 40 minutes for planning and writing the essay, which is about how much time you’ll have for each essay on the exam. I typically gave myself 10 minutes for planning and 30 minutes for writing. After I wrote it, I looked at the released responses and read the feedback and thought about what I could have done better and what I should do next time. I also had about 3 or 4 books prepared for open-ended question. When it got closer to the exam and I had less time to write essays, I still looked at the questions and planned what I would write (and which book I would have used for the open-ended question).
As far as multiple choice, I found a few practice multiple choice sets online from released exams. However, in the fall, I was studying for the SAT Lit subject test, so I had the Barron’s SAT Lit prep book. They have a lot of practice MC questions, and although I took them around September, I can’t help but feel it helped with AP Lit MC. I would take the tests, go over what I missed, and discuss certain passages with my AP Lit teacher. Also, my AP Lit class wasn’t until Spring semester, (I had him for AP Lang as well, which is why I was able to go over those passages with him in the fall) so I didn’t get to study poetry in class until around April. Studying the SAT Lit MC, however, helped greatly with being able to analyze poetry (and, therefore, being able to answer questions and write about it). Although, class discussions and writing assignments about poetry were significant in my preparation for being able to answer those questions/FRQ on the exam.