AP English Language and Composition Hard practice

Which additional source, if added to A and B, would MOST help an essay writer adjudicate between safety and economic concerns?

Passage 3 (excerpt from an original editorial on grade inflation).

When more than half of all college grades are A's, we have to admit that 'excellence' has lost its meaning. The defenders of grade inflation argue that today's students work harder than ever and that high grades reflect that work. The argument is appealing but flawed. The point of a grading scale is not to reward effort; it is to distinguish levels of mastery. A pole vaulter who bends but does not break the bar does not win the meet because she tried hard. To pretend otherwise is to confuse the metric with the encouragement we wrap around it. If the grading scale cannot tell us who has mastered the material best, we will need a new scale — and the students relying on the old one to communicate their achievements to graduate schools and employers will be the ones paying the price.

In Passage 3, the closing claim about graduate schools and employers serves to:

Passage 2 (excerpt from an essay on standardized testing).

I have been a critic of standardized testing for two decades. So it surprises my friends when I argue against the recent push to eliminate the SAT outright. The case against the test has always been about its misuses: as a proxy for parental income, as a sorting device that masks itself as a measure of merit, as a cudgel against under-resourced schools. None of that is wrong. But the test does one thing that the alternatives proposed to replace it do not: it produces a measurement that is the same for a student in Mississippi and a student in Manhattan. Imperfect measurement is a stubborn good. The proposal to replace the test with admissions essays, letters of recommendation, and 'holistic review' substitutes a measurement we know is biased for a series of evaluations we know are MORE biased — and which can never be audited. This is not a defense of the SAT. It is an argument that the alternative is worse.

Based on Passage 2, which strategy does the author use to manage potential reader resistance?

Passage 3 (excerpt from an original editorial on grade inflation).

When more than half of all college grades are A's, we have to admit that 'excellence' has lost its meaning. The defenders of grade inflation argue that today's students work harder than ever and that high grades reflect that work. The argument is appealing but flawed. The point of a grading scale is not to reward effort; it is to distinguish levels of mastery. A pole vaulter who bends but does not break the bar does not win the meet because she tried hard. To pretend otherwise is to confuse the metric with the encouragement we wrap around it. If the grading scale cannot tell us who has mastered the material best, we will need a new scale — and the students relying on the old one to communicate their achievements to graduate schools and employers will be the ones paying the price.

If a critic argued in response to Passage 3 that 'grading scales naturally compress over time because students do improve,' how would this affect the author's argument?

Passage 1 (excerpt from a letter to a school board, written by a parent).

To the members of the Glenmoor School Board,

My daughter is in fifth grade at Eastside Elementary. I'm writing not to complain about the new math curriculum — I know other parents have already done that — but to ask the Board to do one small thing the curriculum vote did not require. The textbooks have arrived. The teachers have been trained. What hasn't happened, as far as I can tell, is a clear explanation to families of how the new approach actually differs from the old one. Without that, parents like me are reduced to guessing whether the homework our children bring home is on track or off the rails. I'd like to ask, on behalf of everyone in the same position, that the Board organize one evening session, open to families, with a teacher walking through a typical unit. That's it. No reversal, no debate — just a thirty-minute window to see what our kids are seeing. Thank you for considering it.

Based on Passage 1, how does the writer's strategic CHOICE TO DISTANCE HERSELF from existing complaints affect her credibility with the Board?

Passage 2 (excerpt from a fictional city-council address by a local resident).

Mr. Chair, the proposal to widen Main Street from four lanes to six is being sold to us as progress. Let me suggest a different word: surrender. Surrender to the assumption that a city's job is to move cars through it as fast as possible. Every block we widen will displace a row of shopfronts. Every shopfront lost is a small business closed, a face removed from the daily life of the street. The drivers we are widening the road for will not stop here. They are passing through to somewhere else. The neighborhood we tear up will not be theirs to miss. I urge the Council to vote no — not because we cannot build for the future, but because the future we are building tonight is one in which Main Street is no longer a street, only a way to leave.

In Passage 2, the closing phrase 'no longer a street, only a way to leave' chiefly functions to:

Passage 2 (excerpt from an essay on standardized testing).

I have been a critic of standardized testing for two decades. So it surprises my friends when I argue against the recent push to eliminate the SAT outright. The case against the test has always been about its misuses: as a proxy for parental income, as a sorting device that masks itself as a measure of merit, as a cudgel against under-resourced schools. None of that is wrong. But the test does one thing that the alternatives proposed to replace it do not: it produces a measurement that is the same for a student in Mississippi and a student in Manhattan. Imperfect measurement is a stubborn good. The proposal to replace the test with admissions essays, letters of recommendation, and 'holistic review' substitutes a measurement we know is biased for a series of evaluations we know are MORE biased — and which can never be audited. This is not a defense of the SAT. It is an argument that the alternative is worse.

Based on Passage 2, the phrase 'imperfect measurement is a stubborn good' functions to:

Passage 1 (excerpt from an essay on remote work).

Defenders of remote work often argue that it makes workers more productive. The data, on average, supports them. But to stop there is to misread the argument. The serious case against remote work was never that individual workers produce less. It was that organizations as a whole — the mentorship of juniors, the slow accumulation of shared judgment, the unforced encounters that produce ideas no one was tasked with producing — slowly degrade in ways that aggregate productivity numbers do not capture. The aggregate is doing the work of obscuring a question we have not yet answered: what happens to an institution when the next generation has never been in the room?

Passage 2 (excerpt from an essay on standardized testing).

I have been a critic of standardized testing for two decades. So it surprises my friends when I argue against the recent push to eliminate the SAT outright. The case against the test has always been about its misuses: as a proxy for parental income, as a sorting device that masks itself as a measure of merit, as a cudgel against under-resourced schools. None of that is wrong. But the test does one thing that the alternatives proposed to replace it do not: it produces a measurement that is the same for a student in Mississippi and a student in Manhattan. Imperfect measurement is a stubborn good. The proposal to replace the test with admissions essays, letters of recommendation, and 'holistic review' substitutes a measurement we know is biased for a series of evaluations we know are MORE biased — and which can never be audited. This is not a defense of the SAT. It is an argument that the alternative is worse.

Passage 3 (excerpt from an essay on social media).

The argument that social media platforms are 'just neutral conduits' has a serious version and a foolish one. The foolish version says that platforms are like the phone company: they pass traffic, they don't shape it. This is obviously wrong — what shows up in your feed is a sorted, ranked, filtered selection determined by code the platform owns. The serious version concedes the sorting and says that platforms should be neutral about the CONTENT of what they sort, even if they cannot be neutral about the FACT of sorting. I do not agree with the serious version either, but I want to be honest about the trade-off. The price of demanding platforms intervene in content is that we will be governed, in our daily reading, by the values of whoever owns the platform. That price is real, and dismissing it is the cheap move. The expensive move is to argue that we should accept the cost anyway. That argument is what this essay tries to make.

Across Passages 1, 2, and 3, which technique BEST describes a common feature of all three authors' arguments?

Passage 1 (excerpt from an essay on remote work).

Defenders of remote work often argue that it makes workers more productive. The data, on average, supports them. But to stop there is to misread the argument. The serious case against remote work was never that individual workers produce less. It was that organizations as a whole — the mentorship of juniors, the slow accumulation of shared judgment, the unforced encounters that produce ideas no one was tasked with producing — slowly degrade in ways that aggregate productivity numbers do not capture. The aggregate is doing the work of obscuring a question we have not yet answered: what happens to an institution when the next generation has never been in the room?

Based on Passage 1, the phrase 'doing the work of obscuring' suggests that the author believes:

Passage 2 (excerpt from a college admissions blog post by an associate dean).

Every fall I get asked the same question, usually three times a day, by anxious juniors and their parents: "What does your committee really look for?" I always pause before answering — not because the answer is a secret, but because the question, framed that way, sets up a misunderstanding. We are not detectives looking for a hidden quality. We are readers, trying to assemble a class of seven hundred students who will help one another grow over four years. So my honest answer is rarely helpful in the way the asker hopes. We look for people whose writing makes us curious to spend an hour with them. We look for evidence that someone has cared deeply about at least one thing. We look — and this is the part most parents don't want to hear — for the small detail in an essay that lets us picture an actual human being, not a polished candidate. Everything else is implementation.

Based on Passage 2, which sentence MOST directly signals the dean's awareness of his audience's emotional state?

Based on Sources E and F, which finding would MOST resolve the disagreement?

Passage 3 (excerpt from an open letter by a city's outgoing public-works director, published in a local paper).

Friends — and even adversaries — I leave this office at the end of the month after eleven years. I want to say one thing before I go. The work we do is invisible. It is invisible when it works, which is most of the time. The water comes on. The street gets plowed. The drain stops flooding. No one writes a thank-you note. And then occasionally — say, one winter morning every three or four years — something fails. A pipe bursts in a neighborhood and the calls flood the office, and the question is always the same: how could we have let this happen? My request to the city, after eleven years of answering that question, is this: be a little quicker to credit the boring days. The people in this office will keep the city running with or without your praise. But we will keep it running longer, and with sharper minds, if you remember that invisibility is the most reliable evidence that the system is working.

Based on Passage 3, the writer chooses the example of a burst pipe specifically because:

Passage 3 (excerpt from an essay on social media).

The argument that social media platforms are 'just neutral conduits' has a serious version and a foolish one. The foolish version says that platforms are like the phone company: they pass traffic, they don't shape it. This is obviously wrong — what shows up in your feed is a sorted, ranked, filtered selection determined by code the platform owns. The serious version concedes the sorting and says that platforms should be neutral about the CONTENT of what they sort, even if they cannot be neutral about the FACT of sorting. I do not agree with the serious version either, but I want to be honest about the trade-off. The price of demanding platforms intervene in content is that we will be governed, in our daily reading, by the values of whoever owns the platform. That price is real, and dismissing it is the cheap move. The expensive move is to argue that we should accept the cost anyway. That argument is what this essay tries to make.

Based on Passage 3, the author's commitment to acknowledging the cost of her own position is meant to:

Passage 2 (excerpt from an essay on standardized testing).

I have been a critic of standardized testing for two decades. So it surprises my friends when I argue against the recent push to eliminate the SAT outright. The case against the test has always been about its misuses: as a proxy for parental income, as a sorting device that masks itself as a measure of merit, as a cudgel against under-resourced schools. None of that is wrong. But the test does one thing that the alternatives proposed to replace it do not: it produces a measurement that is the same for a student in Mississippi and a student in Manhattan. Imperfect measurement is a stubborn good. The proposal to replace the test with admissions essays, letters of recommendation, and 'holistic review' substitutes a measurement we know is biased for a series of evaluations we know are MORE biased — and which can never be audited. This is not a defense of the SAT. It is an argument that the alternative is worse.

Based on Passage 2, the author's complex argument depends on which assumption?

Based on Sources C and D, which counterargument would be HARDEST to defend using these sources alone?