Below is a sample free-response question from a previous AP English Literature and Composition Exam. Once you've read the question, select from the left two sample student responses from actual exam booklets, and a brief explanation of why the responses earned the scores they did.
When you read and ponder the sample student essays [which were taken directly from actual student exam booklets] keep in mind that they were written under examination conditions and within strict time limits; in short, they will be less polished than if they had been developed at home, edited, and carefully presented. Faculty consultants [the people who score the AP Exams] take all these circumstances into account: they have been trained to look at the essays holistically and to judge overall quality rather than to attempt to divide the essay into content and style or to count errors.
Sample Question
[Suggested time - 40 minutes; this question counted for one-third of the total essay-section score.]
Read the following two poems very carefully, noting that the second includes an allusion to the first. Then write a well-organized essay in which you discuss their similarities and differences. In your essay, be sure to consider both theme and style.
I. Bright Star
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art --
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite*
(5) The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No -- yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
(10) Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever -- or else swoon to death.
-- John Keats
*hermit
II. Choose Something Like a Star
O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
(5) Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
(10) By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, 'I burn.'
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use Language we can comprehend.
(15) Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
(20) It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.
-- Robert Frost*
* From The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem. ©1949,
©1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Copyright ©1977 by Lesley Frost Ballantine.
Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Publishers. ©1988 by Educational Testing Service. All rights reserved. Princeton, NJ 08541.
