Abstract
RECENTLY IN SAN ANTONIO, about 530 Educational Testing Service faculty consultants set about evaluating the essays of the over 176,000 students who took the Advanced Placement United States History examination. I had a special interest in two of the essays, having served on the Test Development Committee that drafted them and as one of those entrusted with the task of developing the standards or rubrics with which others would rank the essays for one of the questions. The results of this experience indicated to me a need to address how we prepare students to take standardized exams and to consider what we believe should be the objective of teaching history. In addition to eighty multiple choice questions, the AP exam asks each student to write three essays. One, the DBQ, asks the student to read a series of short documents and analyze them in response to a specific question. The other two essays (FRQs), each to be selected from a choice of two questions in two roughly topical categories, do not include documents, address a significant issue or subject in American history, are open-ended and are much like questions familiar to any student in a college level survey. In reviewing the answers to these questions, I found striking the large number of students who had written reasonable, well-crafted responses to two of them but had clearly misread the question. For example, in answering
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