AP® Reader Reflection: A Vision for Row C Success on FRQ 2

For years, I have taught complex strategies to help students earn the Row C sophistication point, and while most of my students score the point on untimed work and more than half achieve it on at least one timed, in-class FRQ, only 10% of my students score an FRQ2 sophistication point on the exam. Why?

My strategy of teaching students to employ a spectrum of critical lenses requires significant contemplation, class discussion, and expertise development. It works for untimed essays or timed FRQ 3s, in which students can prepare multiple approaches for discussing tensions, broader contexts, or alternative readings (the three best methods to score the sophistication point), but it fails for FRQs 1 and 2, in which most students lack the time to analyze unfamiliar texts brilliantly. Students might have several ways to discuss gender roles, the Harlem Renaissance, or Jim Crow in an FRQ 3 about Their Eyes Were Watching God. But if they had never read Hurston and received an excerpt from the text in FRQ 2, how many would see “Zora Neale” and assume a male author, or see the date of publication but not connect the text to a literary movement or cultural context? The compelling feminist insights we might read in a well-prepared FRQ 3 might turn into “women in that time had it rough” in a timed FRQ 2.

Furthermore, my students do not master writing three essays in 120 minutes after answering 55 challenging multiple-choice questions about five unfamiliar texts before they take the exam, so exam day offers a new dimension of stress. As much as we want our students to take the exam using their prefrontal cortices, we know their limbic systems and procedural memories take charge. In fight mode, complex FRQ 1 and 2 strategies don’t work. Students need to understand the texts quickly and write three essays in 120 minutes. If the sophistication plan isn’t natural and intuitive, they will lack the bandwidth to score the point.

Finally, the sophistication strategies we teach devour test minutes. The two-part theses we love that both respond to the prompt and its ultimate significance set up Row C beautifully, but on test day, most students pay little-to-no attention to part two, presumably because of the ticking clock. I know my strategy of arming students with multiple critical perspectives requires minutes of brainstorming they don’t have. Mathematically, students don’t even need to score sophistication points to earn college credit; why would they invest time they could spend finishing FRQ 3?

So, if we want to increase the odds of scoring Row C, we need to give our students a strategy that is natural, easy, and fast. What could that strategy be?

I think I found it while reading the 2026 FRQ 2 on Ruth’s experience eating her birthday cake in Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Nearly every student empathized with Ruth, and this psychological connection planted seeds of tension and the broader context of childhood development or family dynamics that teachers could cultivate into Row C success.

Nearly every student who scored a 1-1-0 could identify some tension in Rose’s experience of tasting her mother’s struggles. Many writers in the 1-2-0 and 1-3-0 ranges contrasted Rosie’s expectation of the cake with its hidden reality. Some wrote one paragraph about the sweetness of the cake and another about the sourness, both literal and metaphorical. Other students in this range wrote paragraphs about Ruth’s visions of her mother before and after eating the cake. I don’t want to imply that these 1-1-0, 1-2-0, and 1-3-0 essays narrowly missed the complexity point; they frequently featured vague or incorrect analyses of literary techniques or misread Ruth’s mother wildly. But their writers identified with Ruth naturally and discussed tensions in her experience or reflected on the context of childhood.

Essays in the 1-4-0 range analyzed the psychology of Ruth’s mother better. Their writers also made overt attempts at scoring the Row C point, usually by mentioning something about the plights of women, a term from AP Psychology, a socio-historical context, or the text’s ultimate meaning. The readings of Ruth’s psychology improved in nuance. Again, I saw that these students had the raw material to score the Row C point by developing insights into tensions or psychological contexts. These essays didn’t lack the potential for a sophistication point; most just needed greater analytical consistency.

The 1-3-1 and 1-4-1 essays I read all employed the strategy of examining the psychology of Ruth and her mother. These students had compelling insights into the differences between how a child loves and how a mother loves. They could articulate the overwhelming experience of a child feeling her mother’s feelings. Some even articulated how Ruth’s response of “Fine” at the end of the excerpt reflected an uneasy transition into the self-denying mentality of adulthood.

This year, I will teach my students to boost their FRQ 2 scores by developing their natural abilities to understand character psychology. I have seen that nearly all students interpret young characters with some level of complexity and insight. I know that older characters will present some challenge; when I read last year’s FRQ 2 prompt on Rachel Cusk’s The Bradshaw Variations, I found that students struggled to understand Thomas and frequently drifted off-prompt by centering 20-year-old Olga. Still, the more I can help students empathize with a wide range of characters, the more readily they will attain fast, manageable, and natural sophistication points.

 

Will Jurkiewicz

Traverse City Saint Francis High School