Full Free-Response Practice

CHAPTER 19

Full Free-Response Practice

The free-response section gives you two hours to complete three different tasks. The purpose of timed practice is to keep reading, planning, drafting, and revision inside that limit without sacrificing completion. A useful plan stays brief, the thesis stabilizes the argument, and the evidence sequence is chosen before drafting expands. This chapter uses a full three-task section so you can see which stage of the process consumes time and whether one essay is taking time the other two need.

Full Section II Simulation

Treat this chapter as one uninterrupted section. Set one continuous two-hour clock, complete the tasks in order, and do not pause to check earlier work before the section ends. Note your time at the end of each task before moving to the next; the pattern across all three numbers, not any single one, is what the post-section audit will use.

Task 1: Poetry Analysis

Poetry Analysis. Budget roughly forty minutes, including planning.

“The Tropics in New York” by Claude McKay (1920)

Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root,
Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,
And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,
Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,
Set in the window, bringing memories
Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills,
And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies
In benediction over nun-like hills.
My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;
A wave of longing through my body swept,
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

Timed FRQ 1 Read the following poem carefully. Then, in a well-organized essay, analyze how McKay uses poetic elements and techniques to convey the speaker’s complex response to the fruit displayed in the window.

Task 2: Prose Fiction Analysis

Prose Fiction Analysis. Budget roughly forty minutes, including planning. This task deliberately uses drama. The current AP Prose Fiction Analysis question may use a dramatic passage.

From “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare (1611)

[A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard. Enter a Master and a Boatswain.]

MASTER. Boatswain! BOATSWAIN. Here, master: what cheer? MASTER. Good, speak to the mariners: fall to't, yarely, or we run ourselves aground: bestir, bestir. [Exit.]

[Enter Mariners.] BOATSWAIN. Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to the master's whistle. Blow, till thou burst thy wind, if room enough!

[Enter Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio, Ferdinand, Gonzalo, and others.] ALONSO. Good boatswain, have care. Where's the master? Play the men. BOATSWAIN. I pray now, keep below. ANTONIO. Where is the master, boatswain? BOATSWAIN. Do you not hear him? You mar our labour: keep your cabins: you do assist the storm.

GONZALO. Nay, good, be patient. BOATSWAIN. When the sea is. Hence! What cares these roarers for the name of king? To cabin: silence! trouble us not. GONZALO. Good, yet remember whom thou hast aboard. BOATSWAIN. None that I more love than myself. You are a counsellor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more; use your authority.

BOATSWAIN. If you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so happen. Cheerly, good hearts! Out of our way, I say. [Exit.]

GONZALO. I have great comfort from this fellow. Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his hanging. Make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our own does little advantage. If he be not born to be hanged, our case is miserable. [Exeunt.]

[Re-enter Boatswain.] BOATSWAIN. Down with the topmast! Yare! Lower, lower! Bring her to try with main-course. [A cry within.] A plague upon this howling! They are louder than the weather or our office.

[Re-enter Sebastian, Antonio, and Gonzalo.] BOATSWAIN. Yet again! What do you here? Shall we give over and drown? Have you a mind to sink? SEBASTIAN. A pox on your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, uncharitable dog! BOATSWAIN. Work you, then.

Timed FRQ 2 Read the following passage carefully. Then write a well-organized essay in which you analyze how Shakespeare uses literary elements and techniques to convey the complex power dynamic aboard the ship during the storm.

Task 3: Literary Argument

Literary Argument. Budget roughly forty minutes, including work selection.

Timed FRQ 3 Many works of literature portray a character whose loyalty to another person is tested by a competing duty, belief, relationship, or interest. Choose a work of fiction in which an important character’s loyalty is tested in this way. In a well-written essay, analyze how that test of loyalty contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole.

After the Simulation

Score all three responses only after the two-hour section has ended. Reading a scoring note before finishing the section will change how you write the remaining tasks.

Scoring Guide: The Tropics in New York Task focus: speaker response to displayed fruit Example defensible thesis: The speaker’s sensory encounter with tropical fruit converts an ordinary shop display into a painful trigger of memory, so abundance in the present intensifies his longing for a lost home; it does not satisfy it. Evidence targets: Use the opening fruit catalog, the remembered landscape, and the final physical response of turning away and weeping. Row B: Row B should connect present perception to remembered place and explain why the richness of the display increases absence. Row C: Sophistication can hold attraction and pain together: the fruit is both pleasure and evidence of displacement. Watch for: Do not describe the final tears as simple homesickness without explaining how the imagery produces it.

Scoring Guide: The Tempest Task focus: power dynamic aboard ship Example defensible thesis: The storm temporarily reorganizes hierarchy because practical knowledge, not noble title, determines authority: the Boatswain’s blunt commands strip political rank of usefulness while the nobles’ demands reveal how difficult it is for them to accept power that circumstances have reassigned. Evidence targets: Use the opening commands, the Boatswain’s insistence that nobles stay below, Gonzalo’s reminder of rank, and the Boatswain’s answer that the sea does not care for ‘the name of king.’ Row B: Strong commentary should show the interaction between physical danger and social language; summary of shouting aboard ship will not be enough. Row C: Sophistication can note that the Boatswain’s authority is situational, not a permanent social revolution; the storm suspends hierarchy because survival requires it. Watch for: Do not call the Boatswain socially equal to the king outside the emergency.

Scoring Guide: Loyalty tested by competing claim Task focus: loyalty Example defensible thesis: In Hamlet, loyalty to his father’s command repeatedly conflicts with Hamlet’s moral and intellectual need for certainty; because he cannot satisfy both demands cleanly, the play turns loyalty from a virtue into a source of delay, self-division, and collateral damage. Evidence targets: Use the Ghost encounter, play-within-play, prayer-scene hesitation, and final movement toward action. Other works must present genuinely competing claims, not simple betrayal. Row B: Row B should show the competition between loyalties or principles in specific scenes. Row C: Sophistication can show that loyalty may be sincere while still producing destructive action. Watch for: Do not treat the character as simply loyal or disloyal; the task is the test created by competing claims.

Review Your Section II Performance

Record the actual time spent on each task and compare it to the forty-minute reference. If one task ran long, identify which stage caused it: extended planning, a slow start to drafting, or continued revision after the argument was already complete. If a task finished with time to spare, check whether the response used the available time for additional specific evidence or stopped once it reached a minimum viable length. This audit looks for patterns across timed sections. The same stage running long or short across multiple attempts points to a process habit to adjust before the full practice exams.