Ridiculous Answers On AP Tests

Hey guys,

So AP season is here, and for all of you high school students taking the test, here are some really ridiculous answers test graders have seen.

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1. An essay on a made-up book.
The AP graders are allowed to read the responses to open ended questions on books they haven’t read, but usually those graders tend to pass it off to someone who has actually read it. One day a grader got a response on a book she had never heard of, so she tried to pass it on to someone else. But no one else at her table, or in her room, had heard of it either, which in this case is strange, because this is a room full of English teachers, and all of the source works for that response are supposed to be of a certain academic caliber. After finally resorting to looking the book up online and calling around to a few bookstores, they determined the book did not exist. Someone had made up an entire plot-line, and then analyzed it and wrote an essay on it.

2. An illustration of College Board’s annihilation.
The essay contained no words—just a picture of Godzilla and King Kong attacking the College Board building.

3. At least he was an honest test-taker?
Answer on a free response question: “I know I failed this, but the teacher was a milf, so it was totally worth it.”

4. Expressing what an awful idea Prohibition was.
A student wrote: Prohibition was a non-alcoholic drink recipe for disaster.

5. A student trying to make light of a bad situation.
A history professor said that one time there was a test where the student just traced an outline of his hand, with a small caption underneath that said, "High five!" She gave the paper a high five, but still gave the student a zero.

6. A pretty brief summary of the reformations in England and Germany.
An essay question one year asked to describe the similarities and differences between the protestant reformation in England and Germany. One student wrote, "In Germany, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. In England, Henry VIII nailed Anne Boleyn."

7. This is what happens when you translate “laughter” in Spanish to “crying”:
A student mistranslated the words for laughter and smile in her head as crying and sadness. She ended up writing 200+ words about the health benefits of being sad.

8. A slip-up on the AP Music Theory exam.
There’s a sight-singing section on the exam where you had to sing onto a tape that would be scored based on accuracy. As a grader, he had to hear a TON of really horrible ones, but there was one story he couldn’t forget.
The student’s recording began fine, and then the student made a mistake, yelled “Ahh FUCK!” and then proceeded to start singing “Tooty Fruity”.

9. An AP Euro student who evidently didn’t know one Enlightenment thinker.
One year, the essay was on Enlightenment thinkers. One student wrote, “The Enlightenment had many great thinkers, none of which come to mind currently.” and nothing else.

10. The writing dirty jokes and then crossing them out trick.
A student put really irrelevant jokes/dirty jokes in the middle of her essays, and then cross them out (because they can’t be graded) but sure as hell could be read.

11. A somewhat hostile illustration.
An English teacher said that one of his favorite essays that he graded was actually not an essay at all, but a “perfectly drawn and shaded” picture of a middle finger. Said he almost didn’t have the heart to give him that zero.

12. A $5 bill taped to the exam.
An exam book with $5 taped to the page inside has an essay that said, “Please, have mercy.”

13. The entire lyrics to N.W.A’s “Fuck The Police.”
In order to increase the essay length, a student wrote out the entire lyrics to N.W.A's "Fuck The Police" in the middle of his essay and then proceeded to cross it out.

14. A student who couldn’t handle the elitist tone on his AP English Literature exam.
When a student took his AP English Literature exam, the final of the three essays had a prompt that said “Pick a work from this list or one of similar literary quality and discuss character foils.”
Well, he got pissed off at the elitist tone of the “literary quality” bit, so he started his essay: “Literary quality is a very subjective thing. Nowhere are character foils more evident than in Dr. Seuss’s masterpiece, Go Dog Go.”
He then proceeded to write an entire essay on character foils in Go Dog Go, comparing the black dogs to the white dogs, the dogs over the house to the dogs under the house, etc.

15. An essay written backwards.
A grader said an essay he received one year was written perfectly backwards. He had to hold it up to a mirror to decipher it.

16. A virus written on the AP Computer Science exam.
One student, frustrated with his inability to figure out what the hell they wanted versus his years of actual programming experience, wrote a virus.

17. When in doubt, go for panda facts.
One student blanked out on one of the essay responses for AP English Literature and just ended up writing every fact she knew about pandas. Got a 2.

18. A plea of sorts.
A student wrote a rap about how his mother made him take the class and begged the reader to give him a 5.

19. A kid who wrote a two-act play across two different AP tests.
A student wrote a two-act play about a couple trapped in zoo over night. While trapped there, a radioactive source causes the animals to mutate into human/animal hybrids and the human/animal hybrids chase the couple throughout the zoo, trying to eat them. The first act was in his AP English Lit exam; the second act was in his AP Euro exam.

20. A scary-looking clown and Breaking Bad quotes.
A student taking an AP Chemistry exam had no idea what he was doing. So on one of the pages where he was supposed to be answering a question about batteries, he put a very large, very menacing picture of an evil clown and a bunch of "Breaking Bad" quotes.

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For all of you graders out there, what ridiculous answers have YOU seen?