AP Reading Two: Once More Unto the Beach, Dear Friends

For the second year in a row, I am spending time in Daytona Beach, Florida grading the AP English Language exam with around 900 distant friends and colleagues. This year, we’ve got around 300,000 essays to grade (gulp) and about one week to do it. It’s the largest volume of essays AP has ever contended with, but we’ve compensated with a higher percentage increase of raters this year, which means we should hopefully be finished in time to enjoy the sand, racing nostalgia, and (from the perspective of this jaded Chicagoan) comically cheap beer.

The AP Reading, of course, is actually beneficial in ways that have nothing to do with inexpensive booze. It is a chance to reconnect with old friends from grad school, and make some new ones from other colleges and universities. Additionally, as a freshman comp instructor, it provides a good opportunity to chat with high school instructors, who will no doubt be sending me some of their students in a year or so. That kind of perspective is quite valuable in the world of first-year writing, as is the appreciation for the wide range of skill levels that actually take the AP exam nationwide. And they come in all shapes and skill levels, I have to say.

Before heading out to the beach, however, I’d like to share this delicious new bit of counterculture: evidently, some student somewhere got it in his head that students should write “THIS IS SPARTA!!!” in the interior of their AP essays, so that raters would keep encountering the randomly inserted phrase and have no idea what was going on. Ha-ha! Those wacky student antics sure do cause us to laugh with delight, yes sir! Well . . . I find it entertaining anyway. But the trend was widespread enough that scoring leaders had to make an announcement saying that raters should neither reward nor penalize the phrase. In the first day of grading, I’ve already found one Sparta reference and my table has already found five.

In the interest of honesty . . . if I were an high school AP student I totally would have worked in “This is Sparta.” So check back at the end of the week for the final tally, as well as other notes from the week. It should be fun.

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Jun 11, 05:01 PM.
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2 Comments for AP Reading Two: Once More Unto the Beach, Dear Friends

  1. Posted by Heather Ackmann

    For those of you interested, on Facebook the group is actually named this: Everybody write “THIS IS SPARTA!” on your AP and school essays

    The group currently has 33,840 members! I imagine you’ll find a lot of essays with that written on it.

  2. Posted by Janet

    I am such a loser! I could have been there with you sipping pina coladas on the beach after a long day of grading. I just heard from ETS and they turned down my TOEFL grading application…it was a shot in the dark because I have no formal ESL experience (even though a third to a half of my students in any given class were ESL at NSCC.) Let me know when to sign up for the next summer AP English grade-in and maybe together we can count how many spartans we can spot in a day next year. I am totally jealous!

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