Ms. Nettles

The 2026 AP English Language and Composition Exam scores: 5: 15%; 4: 28%; 3: 32%; 2: 15%; 1: 10% The 2026 AP English Language and Composition exam was taken by 631,000 students, ~4% of the U.S. high school population. The exam questions and essay topics were developed by a committee of college faculty, including English professors from Duke University, Florida State University, the University of Maryland and the University of California systems — and master AP teachers from across the nation. Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQ) 1.The highest-performing area were questions assessing students’ ability to accurately identify Claims and Evidence within texts across a wide range of styles and complexities. These students are reading arguments carefully and identifying how evidence functions. Students achieving AP 5s typically answered 100% of these questions correctly, while students achieving AP 4s generally only missed a single point, and students achieving AP 3s typically earned 75% or more of the possible points. 2.Students also scored very well on questions related to analyzing and understanding the Rhetorical Situation in reading (about 81%). Students earning AP 4s and 5s generally answered 100% of these questions right, and students earning AP 3s missed only a single point here. 3.The most challenging MCQ area was Style — questions in which students were asked to identify features and aspects of writers’ style in the passages they analyzed. Only 5 MCQs focus on this area, and they neatly differentiated across student abilities: generally, students achieving AP 5s earned all 5 points possible, students earning AP 4s earned 4 of the 5 points, and students earning AP 3s earned 3 of these 5 points. Attending to a writer's word choice, syntax, and tone at the sentence level remains the area with the most room for further growth and improvement. Free-Response Questions (FRQ) apcentral.collegeboard.org/m… Over a single 2-hour-and-15-minute session, students wrote three complete essays — a source-based synthesis argument, a rhetorical analysis, and an original argument — each demanding sustained reasoning and control of written English. These three free-response questions span the core of the discipline — synthesizing sources into an argument, analyzing another writer's rhetorical choices, and constructing one's own argument — and I love that the committee anchored them in sources and ideas that students are not likely to already have examined in class: the value of napping and how we rest, what it means to do creative work, and how much weight we should give to other people's opinions. This is part of what the committee must do: select source material that students will not already have studied in class, so that on exam day students are drawing upon their own skills, not an interpretation already given to them by a teacher or AI. Moreover, unlike AP English Literature and Composition, which focuses on novels, stories, drama, and poetry, AP English Language and Composition focuses on reading and analyzing non-fiction (speeches, essays, articles) and on writing argumentative, evidence-based, rhetorically effective essays, a powerful skill that is an anchor for a wide variety of career pathways. Because AP scores are reported on a 5-point scale, the free-response rubrics deliberately include foundational points that separate AP 1s from 2s, mid-range points that distinguish 2s, 3s, and 4s, and a small number of advanced points designed to differentiate AP 5s from AP 4s. FRQ #1, the Synthesis question on the value of napping, required students to read six authentic sources — reporting from national and international news outlets, a research university's findings, a data graph from a nonprofit health foundation, and a documentary photograph — then weigh competing evidence and build a defensible position. In short: college-level information literacy: evaluating real sources and putting them into conversation. Nearly every student — about 98% — earned the thesis point, stating a defensible position. This is the foundational move that is expected even among students receiving AP 1. The evidence-and-commentary rubric row is what most meaningfully differentiates across scores of 2, 3, 4, and 5. AP students receiving a 2 were usually able to earn just one of these points, whereas AP students receiving a 5 typically earned perfect scores on this row, not missing a single point. Selecting apt evidence from the sources and using commentary to explain how the evidence supports a line of reasoning — rather than merely quoting the sources — is what moved an essay up this scale. FRQ #2 asked students to analyze how writer Laura Amy Schlitz uses rhetorical choices—including an extended kite-flying metaphor—to convey what it means to be a writer. Why include a speech by a children's-book author, whose syntax and vocabulary in this speech are quite simple, on a college-level exam? Because the professors and educators who build the AP exams select passages the way college English faculty do: by stylistic, rhetorical, and interpretive complexity—not by Lexile scores, which measure only syntax, sentence length, and vocabulary. By that narrow metric, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Elie Wiesel, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison would all be disqualified: their Lexile scores are similar to Schlitz’s. The statistics for this question are clear. FRQ #2 had a mean/max difficulty of .57—the hardest question on this year's exam, and consistent with the difficulty of FRQ #2 in prior years. Rhetorical and thematic complexity simply aren't the same as syntactical complexity, which is rarely the deciding factor when faculty choose what's worth analyzing. As in FRQ #1, AP students receiving a 2 were usually able to earn just one of the evidence and commentary points, whereas AP students receiving a 5 typically earned perfect scores on this row, not missing a single point. An impressive ~30,000 students earned the sophistication point for the skill with which they unpacked Schlitz’s rhetorical choices and strategies. FRQ #3, the Argument question based on a claim by physician, engineer, and former astronaut Mae Jemison, asked students to argue the extent to which they found Jemison's claim valid. Students generally found this essay slightly less challenging than FRQ #1, and significantly less challenging than FRQ #2, as demonstrated in their points earned. Almost all students — about 98% — established a defensible thesis, the foundational point expected even of students receiving an AP 1. Students receiving 2s were typically able to generate more effective evidence and commentary than in their other two essays, earning 2 of the 4 points possible here, so the real differentiation this essay provided was for students achieving AP 4s and AP 5s, who consistently earned all or all but one of the points possible. So: real kudos to the students who succeeded on this exam. Three full essays, six sources to weigh, an artful piece of rhetoric to analyze, and an original argument to defend — all in a single sitting. The committee built a demanding, content-rich measure of college-level reading and writing, and it’s exciting to see such a significant number of students meeting these high standards. All subjects' AP score distributions for 2026 will be posted here when available: apstudents.org/score-distrib…