Blog Post #2: Test Reflection

After taking the practice AP exam today I found out that there are a lot of things that I can improve on over the next couple of months. Going into the exam, I had no idea what to expect. I hadn't taken AP Comp last year so I wasn't really sure how an AP English test would be set up and what the questions would ask. Overall I think that I did a little bit worse than I expected because I got a 55% but it was just a practice. My strengths were identifying literary devices and finding our the meaning of the literature. In order to do better next time, I am going to set some goals to improve my weaknesses.

My first goal is to improve my vocabulary. The test used a lot of vocab words that I was not familiar with. I noticed that a lot of the words used on the AP exam are the same as the ones used on the SAT. There are websites that have vocab lists from the SAT that I can make into flashcards to study over the next 8 months so that I will be more prepared. To make this into a measurable goal, I can try to reduce the amount of words used in the questions that are unfamiliar to me. On this test, there were 14 words that I didn't know used in the questions. I would like to lower that number by 3 or 4 every time that I take a practice exam.

Another thing that I struggled with was analyzing the text. To be more specific, I had trouble noticing a lot of the details in the literature that helped to answer the questions. My second goal is to become better at analyzing and interpreting literature and I can measure this by how many questions that I get right on the practice exams. In the "Thinking About Literature" chapter, there were a couple of tips for analyzing literature so I hope that with more practice and reading in the textbook, I will become better paying attention to the details in literature.

My final goal is to spread out my time wisely when taking the test. It only took me a little bit over 30 minutes to complete the test today. After grading my test, I wished that I hadn't rushed so much on the exam because if I would have used the extra 20 plus minutes that I wasted after finishing then I may have done better. By the time that I take the actual AP exam in May, I want to be able to comfortably finish this section of the test within just less than an hour so that I can make use of all of the time given to make sure that I am confident with my test answers.