Advanced Placement Spanish Literature

Advanced Placement (AP) Spanish Literature is a high school course and examination offered by the College Board's Advanced Placement Program.

The course
This course is based on improving skills in writing Spanish, and critical reading of advanced Spanish and Latin American literature. It is typically taught as a Spanish V or VI course. The AP Spanish Literature course is designed to be comparable to a third-year College/University introduction to Hispanic literature course. Students concentrate on developing proficiency in reading and writing in preparation for the AP Spanish Literature examination. In addition, this course will emphasize mastery of linguistic competencies at a very high level of proficiency.

The course has a required reading list which draws from a variety of sources including well known authors and poets as Federico García Lorca, Miguel de Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, Gabriel García Márquez, Alfonsina Storni, Juan Rulfo, Isabel Allende and Miguel de Unamuno, as well as a variety of lesser known short stories, poems, and novels.

The exam
The exam is divided into two sections with several parts. Section one is a section on reading analysis, and is completely multiple choice. 80 minutes are given for this section, and the grade received comprises 40% of the overall exam grade.

Section two is free-response, and requires three different essays to be written in Spanish on prescribed topics. Essay #1 requires students to analyze a poem. Essay #2 is on the subject thematic analysis, requiring students to analyze themes from works in the course's required reading list. In Essay #3, students must answer free-response questions about an excerpt from a required reading or write an essay analyzing critical commentary of a portion of the required reading. Each essay is worth 20% of the student's grade. Individual essays are graded based on both the accuracy and comprehensiveness of their content and their accuracy and fluency of language. Students are recommended to take 30 minutes given to complete the first essay, and 40 minutes given to complete the second and the third essays.

The test is approximately three hours in duration.

Grade distribution
In the 2007 administration 15,321 students took the exam from 1,491 schools. The mean score was a 2.84.

The grade distribution for 2007 was: