The school year started and I got my first set of AP Literature practice essays to score. While most of the students in the class are only juniors rather than seniors, the national norm, that is still no excuse for the poor writing I am seeing. The students are mostly quite bright, mostly identified as gifted by some testing done when they were wee ones, mostly determined to go to prestigious colleges. But they cannot form arguments, cannot keep a consistent tense, cannot attach the proper pronouns to nouns, and so on and so on. They all seem to understand Crime and Punishment, but what should be the most basic elementary grammar and writing skills elude them. Then the ones who are fully convinced that they are geniuses, write so pedantically with such convoluted and complex constructions that they often forget where they were going when they started the sentence. They end up with noun/verb disagreements at worst and simple confusion at best. Those who do well in the class and exam are given college credit in many schools.
One would hope that students who are assigned to an Advanced Placement class would have reasonable skills from elementary school. Unfortunately that is rarely true. It seems that all of their teachers wanted to make what they read relevant by letting them make dioramas for their book reports. It really isn't rocket science.
I see them later in higher education--not much different, sad to say.
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