Practice AP Multiple Choice Test Reflection

My test results were, quite frankly, bizarre to me. Several of the questions I missed I could have easily gotten right had I paid closer attention to the text. For example, I missed question one simply because I didn’t think of the extended metaphor between the turbulent weather and the British legal system for this question. I noticed the metaphor in the context of other questions, yet for some reason this question threw me off. My guess is that I was looking at the imagery in too literal a fashion and wasn’t analyzing it correctly. However, if I analyzed the text first without fully reading through it, I would have likely missed some crucial details that come from understanding the emotional aspects of the piece.

            
This type of error also persisted within the other classic text, Jane Eyre. I missed out on some simple details simply because I was attempting to take in the whole piece at once without compartmentalizing it first. I believe the best way to correct these errors is to annotate the text more thoroughly. For this practice test, I didn’t annotate anything at all. I felt that I would be able to do well using only my comprehension from reading. While I did ok, I know that a more thoroughly annotated text will enable me to further increase my comprehension of the finer mechanisms of each poem. Jane Eyre also proved to be difficult for me because I attempted to draw conclusions from minute details in the text, rather than looking for patterns within the text. For example, I thought the children needed saving (from poverty) just because it mentioned that they hadn’t eaten much. Once again, better notes on the piece would have enabled me to see patterns within the piece, furthering my comprehension.

           
As for the poems, I actually did a LOT better than I believed I would. I tend to be really bad at interpreting poetry, but perhaps that’s just because I normally don’t read poetry the same way I read prose: with an analytical subconscious running alongside my regular reading. Here again, though, I missed out on a couple questions that I would have answered correctly had I further annotated the text. In this case, it was my inability to notice patterns that proved to be my downfall. In the second poem, “The Pulley,” I failed to notice that most of the imagery, while it all involved God, was not using God as the primary subject. Most of the imagery instead used words describing wealth, such as “jewel.” Had I noticed the repetition of the diction involving wealth, I would easily have earned a higher score.

As for the first poem, “The Writer,” I also did much better than I thought I would. I noticed a lot of the imagery here, but this time my downfall was my failure to note contrasts within the piece. I noticed many descriptions that tended to blend into each other, and from there just assumed that there was no contrast between two implied things. Instead, the contrast that didn’t exist was between the house and cargo. I knew that the house was compared to a ship and the daughter’s life to cargo, but I failed to note that neither comparison related to each other. Had I been more thorough in my evaluation, I would most certainly have noticed this. Therefore, in order to improve my multiple-choice test-taking abilities for the AP English Literature and Composition test, I will need to more thoroughly annotate the pieces, to note more patterns within the pieces, and to clearly watch out for contrasts created within each piece. If I do all three of these things, I will almost certainly feel more confident about my abilities to analyze difficult pieces of literature, which is my goal.