Assessing AP Essays as Good to Excellent

AP Essays Assessed in the Good to Excellent Category MUST:

1. Have a topic sentence that is a sub-thesis or mini-thesis for every body paragraph in the essay
2. Be organized in a clear and logical manner
3. Have legible penmanship, good spelling and proper grammar
4. Not have any road maps nor any writing in the margins
5. Not have sentences that begin with pronouns
6. Not use contractions (they make you sound less intellectual)
7. Always be written in the past tense
8. Not be written in the first person
9. Use complex sentences where appropriate (see examples below)
10. End each body paragraph with a clincher sentence or analysis

Sample Complex Sentences

The Kansas-Nebraska Act, designed to use popular sovereignty (or letting the people of a territory decide) to determine the slavery status of the Kansas and Nebraska Territories, only increases growing tensions over the slavery issue.

The Missouri Compromise made it so that any state below the 36-30 line was allowed to have slaves, while anywhere above that line, except for Missouri, slavery would be prohibited.

The new Fugitive Slave law, which proclaimed that runaways were to be denied a jury trial and could not testify in court, upset the North greatly because they feared it would start a dangerous precedent.

The Stamp Act, a tax on legal documents during the colonial era, united the colonies in protest against British policy.

With strong opposition toward the war, the Federalist Party met at the Hartford Convention, with demands for the federal government.

With the death of the Federalist Party came the supposed Era of Good Feelings, a misleading term used during the Monroe Administrations, where there was only one main political party, the Democratic-Republicans.