Peterson's AP Multiple Choice Test

I am generally pretty good at standardized tests, especially ones focused on English. They are, like the name says, pretty standard in their depth and content. However, this test really surprised me. I had difficulty with some of the sections that I thought should be the easiest, and I found myself flying through the sections I expected to be the most challenging.

I did pretty well for most of the test, but the last section really confused me. I initially wasn't sure what I found so challenging, as the literature provided (the excerpt from Modern American Poetry) was the type that I thought I would understand the best. However, once I started trying to answer the questions I found myself second-guessing every answer and getting caught up on questions that seemed like they should have been pretty simple. I would say that the language of the passage confused me, but that wasn't it. I just couldn't understand what the author was saying. For me, that was a really difficult experience. I'm used to being able to quickly read through a passage once and understand exactly what is going on, but in this case that just didn't happen. It looks like I'll definitely have to work on spending more time reading through the provided literature, because that seemed to be my biggest problem. I simply wasn't willing to put in the time necessary to truly understand the passage. 

One thing that really surprised me was how well I did on the poetry sections. Usually when I see a poem I am hesitant, because I don't consider poetry one of my strengths. I think that hesitation is really the only thing holding me back, though, because once I actually looked at the poems, I found that they were not actually too difficult. I'll admit, I had to go back and reread them a few times, because the language is sometimes hard for me to grasp, but I thought that I generally understood the themes. In fact, the only question I missed on the first poem, A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning, was number seven, because I didn't know what laity meant. I would consider that more of an issue of my vocabulary being somewhat lacking rather than an issue in comprehension, though. 

I think in general my main issue was the amount of time I was willing to spend on different items of the test. Because I was expecting the poetry to be difficult, I spent more time on it. This meant that I understood the poems more when I went to answer the questions. Since I was expecting the excerpt to be easy, I wasn't willing to spend as much time on it - partially, I think, because I didn't want to admit to myself that I was struggling. I think I've learned my lesson, though! In the future, I'll spend as much time as I need to in order to really understand every part of the test.