AP® English Literature and Composition · The Exam: Section I, Multiple-Choice
The Digital Exam: Reading and Annotating on Screen
The exam runs in a digital app with the passage and questions in separate, independently scrolling panes, and a highlighter and note tool instead of a pencil. The skill is the same close reading, adapted to a split screen and a visible countdown timer.
The app splits the screen in two: the poem or passage on one side, the questions on the other. Each pane scrolls on its own, so paging through questions five, six, and seven does not drag the passage away from view. That is the whole advantage of the digital format over a paper booklet, where flipping pages means losing your place. It only pays off if you annotate before you need to, not while hunting for an answer.
Use the highlighter the way you used a pencil: sparingly, and only for what every question will draw on. For a sonnet that means the speaker, the situation, and the turn, the volta where tone or argument shifts. Three or four highlights and a short note at the turn is a map of the poem, not a transcript of everything that caught your eye. Highlighting more than that costs time and gives you a passage covered in color with no hierarchy, which is worse than no annotation at all.
The countdown timer sits on screen the whole hour, and it tempts you to check it after every question. That habit slows reading down, because attention keeps jumping from the poem to the clock. Treat the timer like a lap counter: glance at it once per passage set, at the boundary between sets, and let it tell you only whether you are on pace. This connects directly to the pacing question for the whole section, five sets in sixty minutes, so a steady per-set check is what keeps that math honest.
Key terms
- split pane
- the app's two independently scrolling windows, one holding the passage and one holding its questions.
- turn (volta)
- the point in a poem, often near the end, where tone, argument, or speaker's attitude shifts.
- annotation as map
- marking only the few features every question will need, rather than recording every notable detail.
- set boundary
- the point between one passage's questions and the next, used as a natural moment to check pacing.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does the digital testing app split a passage from its questions so you can scroll one without losing the other?
- How it worksWalk me through using the highlighter and note tools to mark a poem's shift without burning seconds.
- Worked exampleShow me three minutes of on-screen annotation on a sonnet, marking speaker, situation and turn.
- Going furtherWhat changes about your pacing when a countdown timer sits on the screen for the whole hour?
Check yourself
End of topic.