Diagnostic Test

After taking the Diagnostic Test I came to the conclusion that taking AP Lit will be beneficial to me. As much as I thought I knew about English and literature, this test proved that there is still a lot for me to learn.

Small details, that I've quickly memorized before a test in past years, came back to get me. When asked to identify what type of poetry a poem is, being able to distinguish between the different types (i.e. elegy, ode, lyric) was difficult for me. As the test showed me, this is going to be something I will need to revisit, and hopefully learn this time. I also realize that I also need to brush up on my different literary devices, though I didn't have much trouble with questions referring to them, they did pop up a few times. From this diagnostic test I also acknowledge the fact that I will have to expand my vocabulary, or at least look at other definitions of words I thought I knew. That said, I feel the context of the words could have been what screwed me up (example: "laity of love"; I knew laity meant lay people but I think the context of the word threw me).

What frustrates me about these types of tests is when they ask about what a poem means or what the author/poet/writer meant. Poetry, in my opinion, is open for interpretation. While the poet may have meant the poem to mean one thing, to someone else it could mean something completely different. Like the saying "One man's trash is another man's treasure" I feel poetry and its significance is determined by the reader. Going along with that, I feel sometimes the tone of a poem or story can be difficult to determine, or at least the tone in which a bit of dialogue is spoken. Sarcasm especially can be difficult to detect on paper, unless its extremely obvious or outright stated that something is being said sarcastically. I think this can then make questions about meaning or what the author or a character believes difficult to answer if the tone is muddled in the reader's mind. Now, when a question asks me what the author thought or believed or how they felt about something it always frustrates me because I don't know what the author was thinking while they were writing. Sometimes there is a special significance behind the words, but other times there isn't and (in my opinion) test such as the diagnostic test like to believe there is hidden meaning behind everything.

Despite finding different meanings in words or interpreting poems differently, I think this test was a good indicator of what to expect and what I'll be learning this year. I wasn't surprised by the kind of questions I was asked, but I was surprised by the difficulty of some of the questions I was asked (hopefully they will be easier by the time I have to take the real AP test). No matter what, after taking the diagnostic test I'm not scared to take the real test at the end of the year and hopefully I will only improve from here.