Assignment 26 - Palmer Lee

Although I may feel differently after taking the AP test in a couple of weeks, I wish you had assigned more timed writings. As much as I don’t like doing them, I don’t feel as though I’ve had enough practice to write a solid paper within that short a time frame. I understand that normally kids have some practice from AP Seminar the previous year, and I did well on the AP Seminar exam last year, but the test was altered so there were no timed writings - the only part of the AP test we had to do were two research papers, each of which we had several months to write. I don’t like comparing people to other people, but I’m going to for the sake of conveying what I mean: In Mrs. Dewees’s AP Calc AB class, we’ve been doing nothing but practice AP multiple choice tests and practice AP ORQs for several weeks, and I feel well prepared for the AP Calculus test. It may be because I’m generally more confident in my math skills than my writing, but I’m more skeptical going into this test than I am with Calculus. I also wish we had a better idea of what AP was looking for; on the most recent timed writing, you gave my essay a 1-3-0, which I am completely fine with and is about what I was expecting, but I know for a fact that at least one peer gave it a 1-4-1. Writing is subjective, yes, but I don’t think I personally understand how it’s graded well enough to be confident in what I’m writing. These problems, especially the first, may not come up at all next year if things are back to normal, and what I’m saying may be completely irrelevant. I hope I don’t come off as too harsh.