Explanation:
I think it’s the hardest AP humanities exam (although I haven’t taken government or economics APs, this was more difficult than Lang and US History).
That being said, I still don’t think it’s onerous or difficult on a general scale.
The class should consist of substantial amounts of reading, critical commentary, writing, discussion, presentations, and research. In my AP Literature and Comp. course, we read about about a dozen books—Atlas Shrugged (Rand), The Reader (Schlink), The Stranger (Camus), Blindness (Saramago), The Kite Runner (Hosseini), No Exit (Sartre), excerpts from Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (Keret), excerpts from Difficult Loves (Calvino), The Metamorphosis (Kafka), Notes from the Underground (Dostoyevsky), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Diaz), and The Sense of an Ending (Barnes). My favorite was The Reader, with The Kite Runner coming in as a close second.
We wrote reaction responses to long weekly or biweekly reading assignments, did a few oral presentations, worked on past AP essay prompts, took some multiple choice tests, and the test was fine. However, bear in mind that literature is my favorite subject and it is what I work hardest in—I annotate with purpose.
I say that the test was difficult relative to other AP humanities exams for a number of reasons:
The multiple choice → it is ambiguous, as all College Board MC tests are, and at the same time requires a coherent understanding of literary terms. This is a grave problem for people who can’t identify a simile or who find themselves incapable of analyzing prose from over five decades ago
Essays (?) → this just depends on your education. If you’re not used to writing essays relatively quickly while producing work of at least medium-level quality, then you will not find this section of the exam easy. Also, one of the reasons why people don’t fare so well on the test is because they haven’t read enough literature to effectively address the third essay prompt (the one requiring you to draw on a work you’ve read to answer a general question)
Passage difficulty → it’s a bit ridiculous that this test has such low standards for essay writing (look up sample essays for AP Lit prompts and see how good the writing has to be to earn a passing score) and also expects random samples of high school students to understand moderately difficult 18th-century excerpts either for essays or MC questions. If anything, it should stabilize the testing experience by addressing this disparity or by removing the ambiguity in meaning of multiple choice answer options
