5 Steps to a 5 AP Psychology, 2010-2011 Edition (3 page)

Free-response questions account for one-third of your final score.

Your composite score on the two test sections is converted to a score on the 1-to-5 scale.

The College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program enables high school students to study college-level subjects. Most colleges grant credit, placement, or both for qualifying AP exam grades. You may want to check with the colleges of your choice to find out their policies. Enrollment in AP Psychology has increased annually since its inception to become one of the most popular of 37 AP courses and exams offered.

AP Psychology is an exciting course to take not only because it gives you an opportunity to understand your own behavior and mental processes better, but also because it enables you to learn more about other people and animals. Benefits of taking such a challenging course can include strengthening your transcript, proving to yourself that you can do it, and starting college with some credit. Admissions officers from Adelphi University to Yale University have told me that their number one criterion for admissions decisions is the strength of an applicant’s high school program.

Additional benefits are sometimes offered. Some high schools weight or scale AP course grades. Because some colleges charge per credit, you can save money. Getting three or more credits for the price of the exam is a good value.

The College Board reports, “Studies have shown that AP students are more likely to maintain a high grade point average and graduate from college with honors than their college classmates of similar ability....”

The following table summarizes the format of the AP Psychology exam.

Table 1.1 AP Psychology

The exam is 2 hours long. During the first 70 minutes, you have 100 multiple-choice questions to answer. At the end of the 70 minutes, your booklet and answer sheet will be collected. However, no matter how early you finish this first part of the exam, you cannot begin the free-response questions (essays) early. The multiple-choice section counts for two-thirds of your score. If you have time remaining after you complete the questions, you can go back to those you were uncertain about or want to reread. You are limited to 50 minutes to answer two required essay questions.

Development of each AP exam is a multi-year effort that involves many education and testing professionals and students. At the heart of the effort is the AP Psychology Development Committee, a group of highly regarded college and AP high school teachers from diverse backgrounds who are typically asked to serve for 3 years. The committee and experienced test-item writers create a large pool of multiple-choice questions. With the help of psycho-metricians (measurement psychologists) at Educational Testing Service (ETS), these questions are then pre-tested with college students who are enrolled in introductory psychology at selected colleges and universities. Questions are evaluated for accuracy, appropriateness, clarity, and assurance that there is only one possible answer. Data from pre-tests allow each question to be categorized by degree of difficulty.

In general, the easiest questions to answer are at the beginning of Section 1, and the most difficult questions at the end. After additional development and refinement, Section I of the exam is ready to be administered.

Numerous free-response questions (essay questions) are written for possible inclusion on the exams. After these questions are edited, discussed by committee members, and
pre-tested with college psychology classes, the committee chooses essay questions for inclusion on a specific AP Psychology exam. They ensure that the free-response questions cut across content areas, are well presented and unambiguous, as well as considerably different from each other. Only free-response questions that will allow for clear and equitable grading by the AP readers (scorers) are selected.

After exams have been scored, the AP Psychology Development Committee and ETS evaluate the test results. The College Board can use the results to further course development in high schools and to plan future exams.

ETS and the College Board periodically survey colleges/universities throughout the United States and around the world to find out what is being taught in introductory psychology courses in order to ensure that what is being taught in the AP course is comparable. The exam presumes the equivalent of at least one term/semester of college-level work.

Based on the latest information, the AP Psychology Development Committee has updated the course description and point distribution outline for the AP Psychology exams in May 2010 and May 2011.

Content review chapters in this test preparation book conform to their outline. The percentage range in front of each topic represents the number of questions about it that will be asked on the exam. For example, 2, 3, or 4 questions will deal specifically with history and approaches; and 8, 9, or 10 will deal with research methods.

Typically free-response questions require you to make connections among concepts from multiple topics, or to apply concepts from different theoretical frameworks to design, analyze, or critique an experiment or other type of research study.

The multiple-choice questions are scored by computer, but this is not possible for essay questions. These free-response questions are scored by a select group of experienced college professors of introductory psychology and AP Psychology teachers who gather at the
AP Reading for several days in June to assess the papers. Each of these faculty consultants spends a day or so getting trained on one question and one question only. Because each Reader becomes an expert on a single question, and because each essay booklet is anonymous, this process provides a very consistent (
reliable
) and unbiased scoring of that question. During a typical day of grading, a random sample of each consultant’s scored papers is selected and cross-checked by other experienced “Table Leaders” to ensure that consistency is maintained across all scorers throughout the Reading. Each Reader’s scores on a given question are also statistically analyzed to make sure that he/she is not giving scores that are significantly higher or lower than the mean scores given by other Readers of that question. All measures are taken to maintain consistency and fairness for your benefit. Your answers to the two questions will be scored by at least two different consultants.

AP Psychology exams are administered to college psychology students at the end of their introductory psychology course, so that their performance on the AP Exam can be compared to their performance in the college course (as measured by their test and course grades). This information is used to guide the assignment of the AP exam grades 1–5 to raw scores.

Absolutely. Even if your high school teacher were to randomly rate one of your free-response questions at the Reading, there is virtually no way he/she would recognize that the paper belongs to you. To a faculty consultant, each student is a number and to the computer, each student is a bar code.