Advanced Placement (A.P.) English Language and Composition Syllabus Please check the College Board Website for (A.P). Advanced Placement classes at: Course OverviewThis is a college-level course, performance expectations are appropriately high, and the workload is challenging. Remember: A student is skipping two years of high school and is now in a college freshman level course. Students in this introductory-level course read, analyze, and write in a broad and challenging range of essays, letters, speeches, images (including art and music), and imaginative literature. The course overview and objectives are taken from the A.P. English Language and Composition description published by the College Board. The choice of texts is based on the representative author’s found therein. The majority of the course readings will be focused pre-dominantly on non-fiction in the genre of American literature. The stated purpose of this course is to emphasize the expository, analytical, personal, compare and contrast, argumentative, and research writing forms that are the basis of academic and professional communications.Students will gain experience in identifying, analyzing, and producing an author’s purpose, needs of an audience, demands of the subject, and the resources of language: syntax, word choice, tone, and rhetoric. Students will become aware of their own composition process through self-assessment, evaluations by peers, and conferences with the instructor. This will be done in the forms of one-on one, large and small discussion groups.Students will prepare for the A.P. English Language and Composition exam in early May, andmay begranted advanced placement, college credit or both as a result of satisfactory performance.This is subject to change and adaptation at the discretion of the instructor. Grade Evaluation and Requirements Students are evaluated on the basis of essay writing, exams, timed essays and exams, quizzes, journals, quality and character of class participation in class discussions. Student grades are based on an accumulated point system. Each graded assignment or activity is assigned a certain number of points based on its complexity and overall importance to the objectives of the course. At the end of each grading period, a student’s grade is determined by dividing the number or points earned by the number of points possible.There are very few grades given during the course; students are mostly assessed on major assignments and assessments. Completion grades are given as many assignments are works in progress that eventually culminate in a final grade; such as drafts of essays or journal writings. Traditional daily grades are not given, as the class is run on a model of a college course rather than a high school one in order to prepare students for future academic rigor.
