and we're back i'm tim freitas from the garden of english and today i'm coming to you with an ap lit and ap lang video let's talk about multiple choice so often students are frustrated with their multiple choice scores you may be one of them and today we can work to fix that but you will have to take action do you want to actually do something to get better i hope so so if your answer is yes well then action okay here's a top five countdown for the things that you can start doing right now to improve your multiple choice scores whether you're a litt student or a lang student coming in at number five the best tip i can give you is to actually read yeah that's all you need to do wait no you need to read without your phone in the room with you or if it's with you at least turn off your notifications you can do it i promise anyway clearly i'm not talking about reading text messages or message boards or just the text bubbles that show up on tick tock or instagram reels and i'm also not talking about reading those incredibly dense classics honestly find a book magazine or website that's your jam and get to it even blogs work and there are blogs for everything out there on the internet like sports how about sports illustrated or espn.com nature how about national geographic contemporary pop culture check out the new yorker i think you get my drift and if you're an ap which student i know you struggle with poetry so you know what i think you should do read more poetry poetry foundation.org has you covered for that and it's all free okay i understand my first wreck is easier said than done but if you do what i just suggested your reading skills will build pretty quickly every year there is a correlation between my avid readers and their high multiple choice scores i want that for you too let's shift to number four in the countdown the best advice i can offer now is that you practice multiple choice often what's nice about this is that if you practice a lot of multiple choice you'll also take care of increasing your reading output so you'll essentially take care of tip number five and number four at the same time if you're looking for multiple choice practice you can start by checking out the garden of english's ultimate review packet for ap lang you can find it linked right down below in the description it includes over 23 readings over 130 multiple choice questions and a bunch more to help you review everything you need to know to get a five on your ap lang exam and for you lit folks i'd recommend checking out my friends at marco learning the garden of english doesn't have a review packet for lit yeah if you're in an ap class looking for more multiple choice and you don't have access to it you can also ask your teacher to open up more multiple choice practice in ap classroom that's something that i do for my students when they ask me for more practice just practicing multiple choice is good but there's something else you can do to really help build your skills when practicing multiple choice once you find out the correct answers especially if you got it wrong instead of always reading the rationales that are written for you you should reason out why the correct answer is correct for yourself and then find the textual evidence to prove it because when you do this you're thinking about your thinking it helps your thinking grow your thinking so you can think better and thinking better helps you perform better especially on the multiple choice task of your exam okay shifting to tip number three this is going to help you create an overall great reading skill if you're reading and don't know a word keep reading kind of like what they say in funny nemo just keep swimming but in our case just keep reading too many students just stop and get frustrated when they don't know a word don't do that you can pull meaning from language even if you don't know what every word means think about this title of one of my favorite short stories the triune tale of diminutive swine i may not know what triune means but i know what tri means three i may not know what diminutive means but i know that swine means pig so that means that i can guess that diminutive probably means little and you know how i figured that out by using what i did know instead of thinking about what i didn't that's called using context clues one way to practice this is if you see a word that you don't know just circle it and then draw arrows to the words in the sentence around it that may help you understand the meaning or look at the word itself and see if you can know any part of it take the word laborious for example totally a word that you might see show up on your ap exam you may not know what it means and there's no context but if you look at the word notice the word labor that's in it well what do you think it means i bet you can guess that's right it means to work really hard to labor that's how you do it all right the second best advice i can give you is to develop a multiple choice game plan before you go into test day now this will look different for different types of people so let me go over some scenarios for those of you who struggle with answering all of the questions in the time that's allotted know that you're not alone and if i were a student i'd probably be with you but here is what you need to do for the first 50 to 55 minutes while you're taking your exam work your heart out at your pace where you perform the most efficiently then with five minutes left if you notice you have questions that are unanswered bubble in an answer to each question some say to just pick one letter and bubble in only that letter to finish up the job but i don't know about how that helps you statistically i tell my students they can randomly bubble but what i do know is that bubbled answers have a higher probability of being correct than unbubbled answers so no matter what you choose to do one letter or varying letters as you go all the way down get this done and if you have a little time left over after your frantic bubbling just go back and pick up where you left off and try to get the right answers for those that you kind of frantically bubbled at least you know you're not leaving any potential points on the table by not bubbling anything in now some of you have a different issue that needs to be game planned you do better with different types of readings so for you lane folks you may struggle with archaic readings so make a plan about how to handle that do you want to save those for the end do you want to do the hard stuff first there's no right way to do it but you need to make sure that you have a plan on how to handle it and what about you lip folks struggle with poetry that makes sense most do so figure out if you want to do the poetry questions first or last your personality dictates this you just have to as polonius would say know thyself if you put on doing your exam a little out of order though make sure that you don't mess up your bubble sheet you have been warm just having a plan going into the test can help you with your multiple choice anxiety especially on test day so don't map this out the morning of test day make sure that you think about your multiple choice plan well before you go in oh and for you lane folks please know that you can do the same thing with this planning you can choose to do your writing multiple choice questions first or you're reading multiple choice questions first just make sure you don't mess up your bubble sheet play to your strengths and to your character for me i know i'd mess up my bubble sheet so i kind of have to go in order but that's my plan and i would stick to it but for some of my students they like the writing questions better so they'll want to start there and then go back to the reading questions that's okay some of my late kids like doing the challenging parts first so they're going to start with the poetry questions and then move to the pros passages it doesn't matter there's no wrong way to do this just like there's no wrong way to eat a reese's but don't go in without a plan all right here's the big reveal here's my number one tip for you as you work to get better at your multiple choice know what the common types of wrong answers are so that you can be more informed as you engage in the process of elimination over the past 13 to 14 years i've noticed that most students can narrow down most questions to a correct answer and what's called a lead distractor and if you know what the common characteristics of lead distractors are you can better weed them out so now i'm gonna reveal some common lead distractor traits on your exam you need to choose the best answers when you do your multiple choice so that means that some answers may be right but they're not the best i need you to keep that in mind as we consider this so here's the first thing you'll want to think about when you're trying to figure out if an answer is wrong you'll see an answer that is half true but has something false in it this is a really tricky answer because most of the time students can notice the truth but when they see the part that's wrong they think they misread the piece and then they question their own reading comprehension as opposed to the answer don't fall for this [Music] [Applause] if you know that one answer is entirely correct and you don't know about part of another answer you're probably looking at an answer that is meant to distract you stick with the one that you know is entirely right have some confidence another popular distracting feature is having an answer that's entirely true but not for the question that you're answering at that moment oh what a pain so when you can't figure out which answer is wrong because both are true and provable with textual evidence go look at the question itself that you're being asked one correct answer won't work with the question itself so you can cross that out as a wrong answer and the final quality of a distractor is sometimes this answer is just an incredibly vague version of the correct answer precision is always best so if you notice two answers look like they say the same thing figure out which one is more specific that one will be the right answer and there you have it all you need to know to improve your multiple choice skills before test day don't forget for you lang folks check out the ultimate review packet linked below in order to study and practice everything you need to know to own your exam and if you're watching make sure that you like this video subscribe to the garden of english and continue your studies by checking out what i've provided for you in these videos right here