As with any multiple-choice test, there will come a time when the studying is over, and you are as prepared as you are ever going to be. You will be sitting at your desk with a sealed exam booklet and an answer sheet in front of you. The proctor, droning on at the front of the room, will finally finish reading the instructions and say, “You may break the seal and begin the test.”
At that moment, what you know isn’t going to change. Your head will be crammed with knowledge, and you might wish you knew even more, but your score will depend on getting what you know onto that answer sheet.
Imagine your exact double sitting at the next desk. In terms of English literature, your double knows exactly what you know. Will you and your double’s scores be the same? Well, if you know how to beat the test, your score will be better. You will squeeze every possible drop of what you know onto that answer sheet while your double will struggle to bring all his or her knowledge to the table. The scores will reflect the difference.
The multiple-choice section of the AP English Literature and Composition Exam is just like any other standardized test in that you should have three serious considerations:
1.) Time management is crucial.
2.) Process of Elimination is necessary for narrowing answers to more viable options.
3.) You must answer EVERY question. Leave NOTHING blank.
In order to do your best on the AP Exam, you need a plan. Stop worrying about doing things the “right way” and start concentrating on answering every question most efficiently. Blank bubbles have no chance, but even random bubbled answers have hope. Go into test day with a plan for answering questions you don’t know and a plan for managing your time.
Here’s an outline of what you should do on the multiple-choice section:
When the test begins, make note of the time. The proctor might put the start time on the board; most rooms have a clock, but don’t count on either. Your best bet is to take a wrist watch and set it to 12:00. It’s easy to read how much time you have left if you have everything in even increments. This is a good trick for taking any timed test.
Because you’ll be faced with four or five reading passages, you can bet on about 12–15 minutes per passage with questions. Keep track of time. Don’t rush, but try not to dedicate too much time to any one passage or question.
Some passages may be a bit easier than others. There is no order of difficulty on the test, but you know yourself and your skills best. If you see twentieth-century literature and seventeenth-century poetry, choose the one that makes you most comfortable. Reading the passage that is easiest for you will help you to start the test confidently and efficiently. Then you reserve time for harder passages to come.
Scan the passages for one that looks harder (to you) than the others. Save this one for the end so that you can use any extra time on it. If you complete the other passages faster than the 12–15 minutes, you can dedicate the remaining time to the reading and questions that will be most difficult. Remember, this passage is one where you may have to guess because you don’t know the answers or you’re running out of time, but that’s okay. If you answered the easier passages with more consideration, it won’t hurt you as badly to miss a few here.
Note our verb choice: work, not read. You’ll see what we mean when we get to the next chapter.
All passages are not created equal. Because you can’t count on easier passages first and more difficult passages later, you have to rely on your instinct and prior knowledge to assess the situation and go confidently in the direction of the test.
One such automatic strategy is to pick a “letter of the day” (LOTD) from A to E in advance. If you run into a situation where you can’t eliminate any answers or simply don’t have time to look at the remaining questions, you can just bubble in that answer. (Remember, you are not penalized for wrong answers!)
This is a quick and easy way to make sure that you’ve answered every question. And theoretically, if the questions are evenly distributed across all five choices, being consistent in your guesses should help to pick up a couple of freebie points.
A key factor on standardized tests is time management. You have to answer roughly 50–55 questions in 60 minutes, and that means there’s no time to waste. The more questions you answer, the better chance you have of correct answers—LEAVE NOTHING BLANK.
Analyze yourself as a test taker and determine how to tackle the test in the best way for you. We can present general guidelines to get you going, but you have to come up with your own personal plan for test day.
Don’t listen to other kids say how “easy” that test was or how “it was so hard I didn’t even get to everything!” If you worry about how others are testing, you won’t be confident in your own abilities. Remember that the first thing you should do is look over the passages to determine your approach.
If you can get to all the passages and answer all the questions with five minutes left over, great, but don’t count on it. Plan ahead. There’s no law that says you have to do the passages in order. Don’t.
As we’ve already mentioned, the first thing you should do as soon as the multiple-
choice section begins is look over the passages—this is definitely allowed. Decide which passage to do first, but much more important—decide which passage to do last.
The object is to find the most difficult passage and put off doing it until the end. There are a couple of reasons for doing this. First, if you’re going to run out of time, why not run out of time on the passage where you might miss a lot of questions anyway? Second, a more difficult passage is undoubtedly going to take the most time. You don’t want to get into a situation where you have to rush just to finish three out of four passages. This is such a simple technique. All you have to do is remember to use it.
It’s true. It is completely possible to get a final score of 5 without doing all the passages. No, it isn’t easy. It calls for excellent essays and accurate answers on the passages you do attempt. If you’d be satisfied with a final score of 4 (and you should be; it’s an excellent score), and if you know that reading comprehension questions are tough for you, then you should definitely consider skipping a passage. Of course, skipping a passage does not mean leaving questions blank. When you get to questions that are too time-consuming or that you don’t know the answer to (and can’t eliminate any options), use your letter of the day (LOTD).
With four or five prose or poetry passages and 55 questions to do in an hour, you need a strategy to make the most of your reading time. It’s called active reading, and it will help you wring information from the passage quickly.
Steps in active reading
Preview the questions—just the stems, not the answer choices. This technique works well for some people and not for others. The passages in this book give you plenty of opportunity to try it a couple of times. If it works for you—if you can retain most or even some of the information you’ll need to find in order to answer the questions—then you’ll be one step ahead when you start reading the passage.
Identify the main point of each paragraph or stanza before you allow yourself to move on to the next one. This will force you to concentrate intensely and will avoid that lost, “what did I just read?” feeling that comes from skimming through a passage. It might help you to make a quick note of a key word or two for each part of the passage.
Don’t let this step slow you down, though. If a sentence or stanza really doesn’t make sense to you, stop and close your eyes for a couple of seconds, look at it again and, if necessary, just move on. It might make sense later in the context of one of the questions.
Ask questions constantly as you read. Why is the author talking so much about snowflakes? Why doesn’t John want to go to the beach with his family? What is the red truck supposed to symbolize? Why does the author use “despondent” instead of “sad”? Why is this dream sequence here? Tear the prose selection or poem apart instead of simply letting it flow into you as written. This step forces you to engage with the passage instead of letting it slip past you.
Identify the main point of the whole passage. There—you’ve got the theme and the author’s purpose.
Once you master active reading techniques, you’ll probably find them useful far beyond the exam.
The key is to take each answer a word at a time. Don’t fixate on what’s right about the answer; if any part of the answer is wrong, then eliminate the answer. Half bad equals all bad. In fact, one-tenth bad equals all bad. Read the following excerpt from John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and the question that follows.
Types of Answer Choices
1. All true but one word or phrase
If part of the answer is wrong, then the whole thing is bad. Read the entire answer choice to determine whether the answer is appropriate for what the question is asking.
2. Distractor/Absolute Wrong Answer
This the answer that just cannot be the answer based on what you read in the passage. Through process of elimination, you should be able to spot this answer pretty quickly.
3. Key/Right or Best Answer
This is the answer that is most suitable in response to the question. The Key may be similar to other answer choices; however, all parts of this answer fulfill the question and align with the passage.
4. Irrelevant Details/Information
Sometimes you’ll see details and think, “ooh! I read that,” but you have to be careful that this doesn’t throw you from the true focus of the question. Some answer choices will include some relevant details but will also include speculative details or things that just aren’t in the passage. Read the entire answer choice before seeing one small detail and making an incorrect choice.
1. Lines 6–9 of the passage best describe the author’s portrayal of Ignatius J. Reilly as
(A) a sympathetic portrait of an effete snob
(B) a comically ironic treatment of a social misfit
(C) a harshly condemnatory portrait of a bon vivant
(D) an admiring portrait of a great hunter
(E) a farcical treatment of an overly sensitive man
(A) You might say, “Sympathetic? Effete? He appears to be a snob but I am not sure what effete means.” He is not portrayed in a sympathetic tone because the author describes Ignatius as “looking down…on bad taste.” If one part of the question is wrong, then the choice is wrong. Eliminate this answer.
(B) He does seem to be a “social misfit” because of his odd appearance and his observer status, and the description is comical in its exaggerative use of detail, so hold on to this answer.
(C) The author may provide a condemning portrait of this character, but “harshly” is too strong a word. Besides, he is not a “bon vivant,” which is a person who lives the good life. Half bad equals all bad, so eliminate this one.
(D) The narration does provide information about a hunting cap, but there is no indication in lines 6–9 that he is a hunter. Do not be distracted by a detail that may appear in the passage but does not provide the information needed to answer the question.
(E) The passage does seem to be farcical, but in these lines you cannot be sure whether he is “overly sensitive.”
That leaves answers (B) and (E).
Ask yourself: is he “overly sensitive”? You might find yourself thinking, “No, it isn’t sensitivity exactly. It is funny, but he seems to be annoyed, rather than sensitive.” However, you are not clear whether he is a “social misfit,” and you are not positive what the word “ironic” means. What do you do? Be fearless.
Pick (B). You couldn’t find anything wrong with (B). It had some tough vocabulary. So what? Don’t be afraid to pick answers you aren’t sure are right. Sometimes that’s necessary. Just make sure you don’t pick answers that you think are probably wrong. We know that sounds obvious, but students do pick weak answers and they know they’re doing it. Why? Because one answer was kind-of-but-not-really-right while the other was totally unfamiliar. The student thinks that the unfamiliar answer might be right but then again, it might be embarrassingly wrong. The student picks the kind-of-but-not-really right answer and loses points but thinks that’s okay because at least it wasn’t the embarrassing answer. Relax! You can’t embarrass yourself on this exam. The multiple-choice questions are scored by a machine. No one—not your AP teacher, not your classmates, not the AP essay graders—knows or cares which answer you pick. Be fearless. If POE leaves you with two or three answers you aren’t sure about—pick one.
In the example above, (B) was correct. If you were solid on the definition of “ironic,” then you probably got the answer without much trouble. (In which case, we hope you followed our discussion of POE anyway because you will need to use it many times during the actual test.) The passage is ironic. It treats Ignatius’s taste in dress as the basis for the irony. He comments on the outward appearance of others as if it indicates that they have no taste in clothing and, therefore, no decency. However, his own ruffled and garish appearance seems anything but tasteful. It is this contrast between the author’s description of Ignatius’s appearance and Ignatius’s attitude toward the shoppers that produces irony. Often irony takes the form of a subtle kind of humor when what is said is different from what is meant. The character in this description means what he is saying, but the author is actually trying to convey the opposite of what this character believes to be true. Irony is an important term, both for the test and for the study of literature in general. We give it a full treatment in the glossary at the back of this book. But this is just one example, and irony comes in dozens of colors and flavors.
POE Summary
When in doubt, narrow down the choices by looking for wrong answers.
Eliminate what you can and then look more closely at what’s left.
Half bad = all bad.
Don’t leave any question blank, ever.
There’s one more time management technique that you absolutely have to know. It’s called the “Art of the Seven-Minute Passage.” We’d like to tell you about it now, but unfortunately the full technique won’t make sense until we’ve outlined the general principles of reading prose or poetry passages and shown you examples of the kinds of questions you’ll see on the AP Literature Exam. You’ll find our explanation of the Art of the Seven-Minute Passage in Chapter 7.
Note the time and the number of passages.
Pick a passage to do first.
Pick a passage to do last.
Work the passage. Use active reading techniques.
Answer all the questions on the passage, using our techniques.
Guess aggressively.
Pick a passage to do last based on what you consider your greatest weakness.
Skip a passage, guess or use your Letter of the Day (LOTD) on all the questions in that passage, and still get a good score.
Learn the Art of the Seven-Minute Passage and use it.
Guess aggressively.
Use POE (Process of Elimination).
The best way to use POE is to look closely at the wording of each answer choice for what is wrong, and eliminate.
Bubble an answer for all questions, even if it’s just your LOTD.