The College Board offers two AP courses for English: AP English Language and Composition and AP Literature and Composition. Both AP English exams require students to answer multiple choice questions (MCQs) and write several essays, with the student’s total score being determined by the sum of points earned in each section.
The exam-based format of the AP English courses make them both extremely boring and useless for anyone who actually wants to learn how to write effectively. They discourage creativity while emphasizing formulaic methods to score points rather than communicate in an effective and engaging way.
The first part of each AP English exam is made up of multiple choice questions. These are an odd way to test students’ ability to comprehend a text. They discourage nuanced interpretations and oversimplify texts (many of which are excerpted from longer works and lack context). The College Board’s MCQs are arrogant assertions that the organization has the sole authority to interpret English.
This arrogance has led to issues for the College Board in the past; on the 2025 AP Language and Composition exam, the organization used an excerpt from Namwali Serpell’s book Stranger Faces without her permission and put forth an incorrect interpretation of the text. The incident serves to demonstrate the limits of standardized testing in that many texts are open to diverse interpretations.
In fact, it is the nature of literature and art to defy straightforward explanations. College Board should recognize this aspect of language and teach students to embrace and explore ambiguity, not reduce great works of literature and rhetoric to simple, black-and-white interpretations.
The essay components of the AP English exams are no better at evaluating students’ reading and writing abilities than the MCQs. This section lasts two hours and includes three essay prompts. Two of these prompts are based on passages the student sees for the first time on the exam. For the third prompt, students can respond using their own general knowledge as evidence. To make sure that students can respond to this third prompt, College Board designs them to be as broad (read: vague) as possible. All three prompts encourage formulaic writing. Students need not engage readers to earn a five. As long as they fully answer the prompt, they can earn full marks, no matter how bland the essay is.
Furthermore, the timed nature of the AP exam encourages educators to emphasize speed over quality, so students rarely get time for revisions or edits to their writing. The result is that the vast majority of essays students write in AP English classes are extremely bland, following the same four-paragraph format and having the same wordy theses. Paragraph transitions are elementary. Introductions and conclusions are paltry, because those sections of the essay have very little potential to earn points.
College Board’s defenders will be quick to point out the AP English courses’ popularity with students (over 600,000 students took the AP Language and Composition Exam in 2025). But enrollment numbers aren’t an accurate measure of whether or not students and teachers approve of the AP courses; for many students, AP courses are the only advanced courses offered at their school. If anything, the fact that so many students rely on AP for an English education make it imperative that College Board deliver a decent course.
There are several changes College Board can make to improve the AP English courses. First, the exam needs to stop testing students on subjective interpretations of texts. MCQs should evaluate students on their knowledge of grammar and punctuation and nothing else. For the essays, students should be graded on the quality of their writing, not just whether it answers the prompt. They should have to engage the reader and be motivated to write an essay that is actually enjoyable to read.
In terms of coursework, English classes should focus on having students read and write as much as possible and not spend too much time practicing MCQs, annotating texts, or prewriting. These changes to the AP English courses and exams would give students a solid writing foundation before college, foster a love of reading, and give them better communication skills in general. AP English could do so much more for students. Right now, it’s a disappointment.
