Diagnostic Test

Taking the Diagnostic Test was certainly interesting. Of course during a test one should always put down the answers they believe to be correct. Well, there was a large space of time between the time I took the test and the time I corrected it and the space of time allowed me to see what many of my answers were: wrong.

I like taking a before and after image of the school year and I sincerely hope the before and after image for the Diagnostic portion of AP English shows a huge difference. There were parts of the test, like for instance the Pride and Prejudice section, that I did well on and felt relatively confident about during the test, but the poetry parts acted as my main issue during the test and the correction. The question I have the most trouble with is "what type of poetry is this". Sometimes I think I have some kind of idea, but unless I am reading a Shakespearean sonnet, I am not going to know the answer for sure. I think the main problem is that the poetry types seems so similar to me. For instance, when I see ode or elegy, I automatically think intense emotion, but many poems have intense emotions and I do not know the difference between the two types. Then with a lyrical poem, I assume it tells a story, but then what does a narrative poem do? In the test, they both happened to be lyrical poems and i still do not know why.

Poems have always posed problems for me, but I have always had a teacher to tell me what they are about, I am hoping I will finally be confident enough to tell my teacher what the poem is about. To understand what a poem is about I always start by checking the author. One of the poems in this test was John Donne, which I was happy to see because I am familiar with him from British Literature. I also think that is why I was so confident with the Pride and Prejudice section. I have not read it, but I am familiar with it and I have, of course, seen many adaptions of it.

Still, just because I knew the author(s) of things, I did not always understand what their own intentions of each piece were. The question that asked what Jane Austen thought of her characters from the writing was hard for me. I could eliminate some answers like "The British middle class has standards of behavior that all people should emulate", but others like "The author finds the Bennets ridiculous" were harder to eliminate because I did find Mrs. Bennet ridiculous and if I did, Jane Austen could too. This question may have been hard for me, but it was a good question. Still, at times I dislike questions of an author's intent because an author's intent can usually be interpreted multiple ways.

Finally the "factual" section of the Diagnostic test came, and I do not have much experience with non-fiction, so this section also caused some issues. Again a question asking about the "mode of writing" came up and I unsurprisingly got it wrong. I have not had much experience naming the type of writing myself, but I am beginning to see and I need to try doing it with everything I see. This time though, I could see how it was exposition as opposed to narration as I had originally answered. Still, many questions like "what is meant by the expression 'reechoings of the old music'" were doable for me. There were two or three other question just like this one, but with different words in the quotations and I did not get any wrong. These questions are easy for me because it is something concrete I can go back to in the text. Overall this section really did not go too badly for me.

The test helped me see what we were going to go over this year and I did about as well as I expected myself to do, still I realized the things I need to work on.