Press Release
In May, students in the Advanced Placement program at Fort Frances High School wrote the course’s mandatory comprehensive exam.
Out of 319,653 students who wrote internationally, 75 percent of Fort High students performed in the top quarter in the Free Response (essay) section of the exam.
The AP program is an internationally-renowned partnership between high schools, colleges, and universities.
While still enrolled in high school, students are provided with a challenging and enriched academic curriculum whereby they have the opportunity to achieve advanced standing in courses at colleges and universities.
In the three-hour English Literature and Composition exam, there are two main sections.
The multiple choice section is comprised of 68 questions based on four sight passages while the free response section requires students to write three essays where they respond to two prompts based on sight passages and one prompt that allows them to refer to a novel studied in the course.
In the multiple choice category, Fort High students out-ranked the overall mean, save the 20th Century Literature category, where they tied.
As compared to the overall mean in the other three categories, the students ranked six percent higher in Prose, five percent higher in Poetry, and nine percent higher in Pre-20th Century Literature.
In the free response category, local students exceeded the international mean by an outstanding 15 percent (specifically 15.6 percent higher in Poetry, 14.4 percent higher in Prose, and 14.4 percent higher in Open).
In this extremely challenging exam, students receive a final grade out of five, which is an indicator to reflect in preparedness for taking second-year university English courses (i.e., 1=not qualified, 2=possibly qualified, 3=qualified, 4=well qualified, and 5=extremely well qualified).
Across the world, 28 percent of the students who wrote this exam received a rating of four or above. But more than half of the Fort High students who wrote achieved a rating of four.
The overall Canadian average of students who achieved a rating of three or better was 75.6 percent, with Fort High boasting an 83 percent achievement in this category.
Jamie Petrin, one the Fort High students that wrote the exam, currently is attending the University of Ottawa.
“AP English prepared me for university more than any other class, by far,” she noted.
“So far, in all the essays and writing assignments that I have done this year, I have been well above the class average and that definitely would not have been the case had I not taken AP,” she added.
