As the title of this page would tend to suggest, the primary intended audience here is composed of AP Language and Composition teachers who want an approach to teaching multiple choice questions on the AP exam; however, anyone is welcome to stay. The information here is not super-secret. Like many of my teaching methods, it's a compilation of various methods adopted or borrowed from other teachers far more talented than I am.
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Typically when I am ready to focus on the multiple-choice section, we've already had considerable practice working with multiple choice as part of the AP Game, particularly battles and quests, so by the time we focus on the section in depth, the "feel" of the AP MC section has already sunk in to a degree. During the initial lecture, I'll explain the following features of the MC section:
Students who want to play with numbers (i.e., "If I get 50% on the MC section, what do I need to get on my essays to get a 3? A 5?") can be directed to the AP Pass site, which will allow them to play with numbers to their hearts' content. (For instance, a score of 50% on the multiple choice section coupled with two 9s and an 8 on the essays would result in a grade of 5. A 50% multiple-choice score and 5 out of 9 on all three essays would result in a 3.)
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In the first day or so of discussion, I run through the primary strategies listed below.
Admittedly, this is a massive infodump of strategies, but these will be strategies we will be touching upon repeatedly. Any other notes or issues specifically intended for teachers are addressed in this lovely color of bright purple. |
Student Strategy #1: ANNOTATE!
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Student Strategy #2: Write Answers in Margin
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To Teachers
To Students
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Student Strategy #3: Vigorously Cross Out Wrong Answers
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To Teachers
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Student Strategy #4: Leave No Blanks
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Choose a Letter
Never Leave a Blank
To Teachers
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Student Strategy #5: Do the Easy Passages First
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To Teachers
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Why Do the Easy Passages First?
Win the Mind Game
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Student Strategy #6: Do the Easy Questions First
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To Teachers
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Sidebar: What Qualities Make Questions Easy, Medium, or Hard?
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Student Strategy #7: Five Above, Five Below
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Jazz Hands Will Save You
Note: I make my students put their hands in the air, "jazz hands" style, to remember this. It's totally stupid. That's why they'll remember it. |
Student Strategy #8: Create a Compass
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At this point, the students are ready to practice one of the most effective strategies you can give them: the compass strategy. I usually explain it by showing them the above brief video on awareness.
Lecture Points
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Thomas Carlyle Passage
It has been well said that the highest aim in education is analogous to the highest aim in mathematics, namely, to obtain not results but powers, not particular solutions, but the means by which endless solutions may be wrought. He is the most effective educator who aims less at perfecting specific acquirements than at producing that mental condition which renders acquirements easy, and leads to their useful application; who does not seek to make his pupils moral by enjoining particular courses of action, but by bringing into activity the feelings and sympathies that must issue in noble action. On the same ground it may be said that the most effective writer is not he who announces a particular discovery, who convinces men of a particular conclusion, who demonstrates that this measure is right and that measure wrong; but he who rouses in others the activities that must issue in discovery, who awakes men from their indifference to the right and the wrong, who nerves their energies to seek for the truth and live up to it at whatever cost. The influence of such a writer is dynamic. He does not teach men how to use sword and musket, but he inspires their souls with courage and sends a strong will into their muscles. He does not, perhaps, enrich your stock of data, but he clears away the film from your eyes that you may search for data to some purpose. He does not, perhaps, convince you, but he strikes you, undeceives you, animates you. You are not directly fed by his books, but you are braced as by a walk up to an alpine summit, and yet subdued to calm and reverence as by the sublime things to be seen from that summit. Such a writer is Thomas Carlyle. It is an idle question to ask whether his books will be read a century hence: if they were all burnt as the grandest of Suttees on his funeral pyre, it would be only like cutting down an oak after its acorns have sown a forest. For there is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle’s writings; there has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived. The character of his influence is best seen in the fact that many of the men who have the least agreement with his opinions are those to whom the reading of Sartor Resartus was an epoch in the history of their minds. The extent of his influence may be best seen in the fact that ideas which were startling novelties when he first wrote them are now become common-places. Multiple-Choice Stems For teaching this passage, distribute the multiple-choice stems to the students WITHOUT the answer choices or distractors. |
Procedure for the Passage
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To Teachers
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Review with the ELMO
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To Teachers
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Student Strategy #9: Don't Eat Sock Cake
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Don't Look for the Best Answer. Look for the Least Worst One.
To Teachers
Teacher Tests are Not Like the AP Here's what I mean. In a standard multiple-choice answer set made up by our teachers, we're used to this basic setup: 1. In which of the following ziodofiudfs could you expect to find lsdifjdljfdijf and sldfjdlijfd? A. Duh answer for people who didn't study B. Answer that has nothing to do with the question. C. Ha, ha, the teacher thinks he's being funny. D. Maybe E. RIGHT ONE On the AP, things are a little different: 1. In which of the following ziodofiudfs could you expect to find lsdifjdljfdijf and sldfjdlijfd? A. Maybe B. Maybe? C. Whut? D. Uhhh...maybe? E. I JUST DON'T KNOW!! I DON'T KNOW!! MAKE IT STOP. We're so used to looking for the "right answer" that we tend to leap on ANY answer that contains right information. The AP knows this, and this is one of their primary traps. The thing is, ALL of the answer choices will have some kind of right-ness about them; ALL of them will be sorta-kinda justifiable; ALMOST ALL of them can be argued as right. In short, they will all look like delicious chocolate cake.
You can't just randomly eat it, though, because although all of the answer choices will look like cake, ONLY ONE has no icky sock mixed into the batter. Instead of looking for the RIGHT answer, you have to start looking for what's WRONG about it. Instead of looking for cake, you have to look for sock. For example, let's say that you had a question set like this: 1. The author's tone in the passage from 17-19 can best be described as a. Miserably joyful b. Bitterly angry c. Gleefully depressed d. Ostentatiously bored e. Reasonably angry Let's say you're inclined toward "A" because the author seemed kind've unhappy, and after all, the word "miserably" is in there. However, was the author BOTH miserable AND ALSO joyful? If the answer is no, then what you have is a lovely case of sock cake: it looks like cake, but it has a chunk of sock in there. Stop trying to justify the cake part. Don't eat the sock! If it's PARTLY BAD, that means it is ALL BAD. |
Antecedent Questions = EASY
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So have we endeavored, from the enormous, amorphous Plum-pudding, more like a Scottish Haggis, which Herr Teufelsdrockh had kneaded for his fellow-mortals, to pick out the choicest Plums, and present them separately on a cover of our own. In line 2, the word "them" refers to A. "plum-pudding" B. "Herr Teufelsdrockh" C. "plums" D. The speaker and his companions E. "his fellow-mortals" Let's consider the choices. The word "them" might tempt us to choose something like answer D, "the speaker and his companions," mostly because a careless reading of "...present them separately on a cover of our own" might lead us to believe that the plums are being presented to the speaker and his companions, who are possibly the "them" being referred to here. However, remember the rule of the antecedent: the noun will come BEFORE the pronoun. The nearest noun in question is "plums," and it's that to which the noun actually refers. Bottom line:
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Function Questions = MEDIUM
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This is a very, very frequent question type, and luckily, it's one of the most amenable to THE COMPASS STRATEGY. When you encounter this question -- only after having done all of the easy questions, of course -- the best strategy is to write in your own answer to that question. WHY does the author refer to "an epoch in the history of their minds"? Put the answer in the clearest, most down-to-earth phrasing you can. Maybe it's "to emphasize that SR (Sartor Resartus) was a MAJOR BIG DEAL." At that point, PLAY MATCHY-MATCHY with the answer choices. Which one is MOST like "to emphasize that SR was a MAJOR BIG DEAL"? In lines 47–48, the author refers to “an epoch in the history of their minds” to
It's crucial that you really stick to the compass here. Of the choices, the one that comes most close is D, "describe the major impact that Carlyle had on other people." Our speaker is definitely not pointing out the ways in which other intellectuals disagreed with Carlyle, (as in answer A), or questioning the continued relevance of Carlyle's ideas; in fact, he's saying Carlyle is just THE MAN FOREVER. Although we may not know the meaning of Sartor Resartus (literally, "The Tailor Retailored") and may consider the process of reading it arduous, that doesn't mean that either B or E is correct in this context. Bottom Line:
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Definition #5 Questions = EASY to MEDIUM
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"Definition #5 Questions" is my all-purpose term for those questions that seem to be asking a very simple question, but which are actually a bit sneaky. Let's take a look at this not-really-from-the-AP example:
In line 45, the word "leaves" refers to A. The act of letting go B. The autumn debris C. The pages of the novel D. The remaining food on the author's plate E. His mother's desertion As is almost always the case, FIVE ABOVE, FIVE BELOW and WRITE YOUR OWN WORDS are two crucial strategies. Let's say the crucial passage read something like this: As I sat in the window watching her drive away in a rush of autumn debris of red-gold, I poked the peas around my plate with a desultory and dispirited air, not wanting to do much more than read, thumbing the leaves of the book between my fingers for all the cold comfort they could give me in my mother's absence. This is a case in which the AP rewards students who don't pick the simple, easy answer -- what you could call "Definition #1." The most common use of the word "leaves" is probably "leaves on trees," which could seem to refer to the "autumn debris," but the other common use is "to let something go, to leave it behind." Those two definitions, as we see in context, are wrong: the author's meaning is clearly something like "pages," which we would know if we had written in our own word instead of "leaves." If you're stuck between two possibilities and you don't know, choose the less familiar but still plausible definition of the word in context. Bottom Line
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No Two Right Answers = MEDIUM
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Frequently, the AP will have what appears to be two "right answers" -- that is, answers which are very similar. This is an extraordinarily oversimplified example, but I hope it will illustrate the concept. Imagine your answer choices looked like this:
Let's say that you know it's not white or yellow, and you're not sure of answer E. That leaves C and D.
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