The College Board had the opportunity to amplify Black and Latinx voices. They didn’t take it.
Last week, Trevor Packer, Senior VP of AP and Instruction at The College Board, tweeted passing rates for the AP English Literature and Composition Exam. While the 10% increase in students earning qualifying scores (from 50.1% in 2019 to 60.1% in 2020) is welcome news, it remains clear to me, an AP English Literature teacher, that the exam is not written to provide equal opportunities for all students to earn these qualifying scores. The AP English Literature Exam is riddled with inequity, consistently valuing the writing and experiences of white authors over authors of color. The College Board, an organization that has touted their value towards diversity and access for all students, often argues it is making concrete changes to promote equity, but my students’ experience sitting for this year’s exam illuminated that, once again, my students will be materially harmed by a system not willing to make radical and necessary changes for racial equity.
When the pandemic forced schools to close, The College Board moved to an online testing platform for AP exams resulting in a number of changes to the way my students would earn AP college credit. Among those changes was a move from a 180-minute, 55 multiple choice and three-essay exam to a 45-minute one-essay exam. As a teacher of the course, my most important charge remained to engage my students with texts that help them better understand the human condition and to coach them to write about these texts and their ideas in a clear, persuasive way. My second responsibility was to validate their efforts by helping them earn college credit through the AP exam. Even in the face of uncertainty, I see the capital both strong written expression and AP credit provides, so I prepared my students for this exam virtually. Over the course of eight weeks, my twenty-nine students finished Pride and Prejudice, started and completed The Color Purple, wrote four essays, and analyzed countless excerpts of rigorous and complex texts.
In late May, when I received copies of my students writing and access to the prompts for the essays, I discovered that my students did not all receive the same prompt, as they would in the paper-based administration of the exam. Instead, my twenty-six students who sat for the exam received nineteen distinct exam prompts, nineteen different passages excerpted from fiction texts. In order to ensure test security, no more than two students in my class saw the same prompt. These added security measures did not trouble me, but the content of the exams did. Sitting down to analyze these prompts was an exercise in frustration with and disappointment in exam writers for The College Board. Of the nineteen excerpts from literature used as exam prompts, fourteen were written by a European or white American authors, four were written by authors of Asian descent, and one was written by a Black author. Zero were written by Latinx authors.
My students, so incredibly smart, so passionate, so aware of the world around them, are all students of color. Most are Latinx, some are Black, and one is Asian-American. The passages the College Board chose show no value for the vast majority of their cultural history or life experiences. The exam asks students to write about characterization and relationships and to connect these characterizations to the real world. After ten years of teaching English, I am keenly aware that a student’s ability to do this comes from their understanding of and connection with the experiences portrayed in the literature more so than from the speed with which they read and the number of “strategies” they know.
When people say students need access to characters with similar histories, backgrounds, and experiences, it’s not just because we want our students to feel included and good about themselves. Yes, this matters. (I am a South Asian American teacher, and I surely felt pride seeing two authors of South Asian descent among the exam prompts.) However, the real reason students should see their lives and their experiences reflected among what they read is because cultural knowledge gives students a gateway to more meaningful analysis and to deeper connections to the human condition. The AP exam judges a student’s ability to analyze deeply, to notice complexities in writing, and to make connections to the broader social and cultural context of a text — and the world in which it was written. When the exam uses prompts that value white cultural capital and centers only white European and white American experiences, it implicitly advantages white students who share that background and disadvantages Black and Latinx students who do not.
Over the past two month, a larger segment of American society has woken up to and is beginning to grapple with the impact of structural racism and implicit bias. Our fight to ensure that Black lives matter begins in our classrooms, our coursework, and the associated exams. However, through their choices, The College Board sends the message that the writing of Black and Latinx authors is not as valuable or as worthy of analysis as the writing of white and Asian authors.
What a beautiful opportunity The College Board had when they realized that the only way to ensure exam security was to include many exam prompts from many works of literature. Rather than having to choose a single author and social context, they could include so many. Yet the writers of the exam chose not to elevate Black and Brown voices. This moment makes it clear that these choices matter. The implicit messages that institutions in power send through their choices matter. In a year that The College Board had an unprecedented opportunity to increase the diversity of authors on their exam, they chose to maintain the status quo. They chose to allow white students to lean on their participation in traditions, values, and experiences based in Eurocentric culture to inform the insight in their AP exam essays in a way that students of color could not.
But as we launch a new school year, The College Board has another chance to right this wrong, to leverage their power, voice, and influence to defy structural racism and inequity — not just offer lip service. According to the most recent AP Report to the Nation, over 60% of AP exam takers identified as white. The College Board has the opportunity and clout to not only better serve Black and Latinx students, but to also to help white students develop empathy and understanding towards the experiences of their Black and Latinx classmates. Now more than ever, it is critical that all students learn the experiences and thematic understandings portrayed in texts by Black and Latinx authors. If The College Board truly values equity, it must make equitable exams its first mission.
Note: The AP Literature and Composition Exam may have used more excerpts from literature as exam prompts, but I was only able to view nineteen because my students received them as their exams.
