Ella Le is currently a senior at Torrington High School. She is the girls’ captain of the indoor and outdoor track teams, and in the fall she runs cross country. She is the senior Student Council’s executive vice president and is part of several clubs, including Model UN, Young Democrats, and the National Honor Society. After high school, she plans to attend UConn to study marketing management. Outside of school, she enjoys hanging out with friends and watching How I Met Your Mother. She hopes that through The Raider Report she can better connect with her community and raise the Raider spirit.
My name is Ella Le, I’m a senior here at THS, and this is my story on how I survived AP Lang. AP English Language and Composition is a college-level course. If you’re a junior right now, you may be taking it. While it ended up being my favorite class, I struggled a lot.
Being about halfway through the school year, I felt it may help to get a little more guidance. ( I definitely needed it). Your exams are approaching quicker than you’d think, so here’s what I did to get a 5 on the AP exam and pass the class with an A because trust me… it isn’t easy.
The Power of Seminar
School is meant to be a safe place, but when you walk into a seminar, you’re entering a warzone. Nuance and rhetoric. These are the words that will haunt you for the rest of your life. Despite how annoying it is to hear about them 24/7 they are essential to not only assignments but to what all this is for: the exam.
Seminars teach you important skills such as the ability to make valuable connections. Whether it’s to your personal life, modern day, other works, etc. The ability to connect allows you to make deep and nuanced points in your essays, making your writing process on the exam much easier.
Within seminars you’ll learn to tap into the nuance of topics and writings. Your writing will be transformed once you learn how to find that depth and taking the time to make nuanced points will help you get that sophistication points on your exam essays.
Studying Tips
This isn’t a class you just wing, let alone an exam. You’ll spend the entire year doing FRQ’s and MCQ’s just to prepare for it. Staying on top of your normal classwork alone, engaging in seminars, writing essays, etc. is key to staying tapped in and will prepare you for the exam ahead. .
When it came to studying in school, it was hard to lock in during study halls or get myself to just do that MCQ. So, to finally lock in, I began meeting with my teacher, Mrs Sullivan, during my study halls and we’d walk through MCQ questions, analyzing the questions and learning how to approach them.
To study outside of class, I would go to Starbucks with a few friends, and there we would just go and lock in, helping each other where we could. Finding an environment where you can lock in for a few hours is beyond helpful. If you have trouble focusing, it’s okay to go by yourself. I promise you, studying isn’t embarrassing!
We all have our days where we’ll look to SparkNotes or Chatbot, but being the student who relies on these things will lead you down a path of bad grades in the seminars, the essays, and eventually the exam.
Time Management
Similar to many of you, I am a procrastinator. Junior year had to be the hardest year of my high school career, and a big part of that was due to AP Lang. What helped me most was one checking the class schedule, two utilizing teacher help sessions, and three dedicating specific hours to studying and classwork.
I will admit I did skip a reading or two for the seminar, and trust me, your teacher can tell. It’s obvious! You can fake it, yes, but you’ll never hit that nuance. I’ve never been more embarrassed than the one time I missed a discussion, so Mrs. Sullivan pulled me out to see my notes. (I did not do them). I told her I forgot my notebook, then she asked me to name some things about the reading, and I just told her I couldn’t remember.
Exam Day
I could lie to you and tell you that I went into the exam completely confident, but honestly, you should be scared. It’s hard, you may not finish the essays, and you’re not gonna feel confident on every question.
The night before my exam I wrote an FRQ and felt so terrible about it; it wasn’t a topic I was knowledgeable about, and I felt I had no good connections to make. The day of the exa,m the synthesis exam ended up being very similar to the FRQ I did, but that didn’t stop me from at least trying.
I took a deep breath and began to go through each source, and tried to make sure I understood what each source was saying. I used the sources I understood most and even was able to feel more confident about the essay by finding evidence from a source that I could counterargue.
Conclusion
AP Lang started as my least favorite class. I thought I was cooked before it even started (the summer reading). I dreaded a lot of my time in it. But once it’s over, you’ll learn how worth it it all was. You’re going to have bad days, bad FRQ’s, bad seminars. But stick with it, and you’ll benefit more than you’d ever think.
If you have any questions or need further advice, don’t be scared to reach out to my email [email protected].