2012 AP ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE RESPONSE QUESTIONS
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION
SECTION II
Total Time—2 hours
Question 1
(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts for one-third of the total essay section score.)
Merriam Webster defines affirmative action as “an active effort to improve the employment or
education opportunities of members of minority groups, women, and other disadvantaged
persons.” As tensions have heightened in recent years over unemployment and college
admissions, affirmative action has been brought further into the spotlight. Some believe that
affirmative action in its current form (race-based) can actually promote reverse discrimination.
Establish a position on the efficacy and morality of affirmative action. Carefully read the
following sources. Then synthesize information from at least three of the sources and incorporate
it into a coherent, well-developed essay that identifies the key issues associated with affirmative
action and examines its societal implications.
Make sure your argument is central; use the sources to illustrate and support your reasoning.
Avoid merely summarizing the sources. Instead, state clearly which sources you are drawing
from, whether through direct quotation, paraphrase, or summary. You may cite the sources as
Source A, Source B, etc., or by using the descriptions in parentheses.
Source A (bake sale)
Source B (AAAA)
Source C (Sacks and Thiel)
Source D (Sizing Up)
Source E (Becker)
Source F (Quindlen)
Source G (Department of Education)
Source H (Carnevale and Rose)
2012 AP ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE RESPONSE QUESTIONS
Source A
http://moonbattracker.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/IMG_3076.jpg
This is a photograph from an affirmative action bake sale.
2012 AP ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE RESPONSE QUESTIONS
Source B
"AAAA Press Releases." American Association for Affirmative Action, 21 Feb.
2012. Web. 24 Feb. 2012.
<http://www.affirmativeaction.org/pressreleases.html>.
This source is a report from a recent United States Supreme Court case concerning the legality of
affirmative action in higher education admissions programs.
AAAA President Gregory T. Chambers stated: “Now that the Supreme Court has decided to
revisit the question of race in admissions decisions, an issue that we hoped had been decided in
2003, we urge the Court to respect its own precedent and uphold the use of race among many
factors in higher education admissions.”
“AAAA will actively monitor the briefs and oral arguments offered in the Fisher case,” added
Chambers. “As the nation’s demographics indicate, this nation is becoming increasingly diverse
and it is not the time to close the doors of opportunity based on race or national origin. This
nation’s future depends upon all qualified individuals receiving a chance to compete in education,
employment and business.”
2012 AP ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE RESPONSE QUESTIONS
Source C
Sacks, David, and Peter Thiel. "The Case Against Affirmative Action." The Case
Against Affirmative Action. Stanford Alumni. Web. 24 Feb. 2012.
<http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/1996/sepoct/articles/again
st.html>.
This source is an examination of the practice of affirmative action in Stanford’s admissions
system, written by two members of its alumni association.
The fundamental unfairness and arbitrariness of preferences -- why should the under-qualified
son of a black doctor displace the qualified daughter of a Vietnamese boat refugee? -- has led
supporters to shift rationales in recent years. Instead of a remedy for disadvantage, many
supporters now claim that preferences promote "diversity." This same push for "diversity" also
has led Stanford to create racially segregated dormitories, racially segregated freshman
orientation programs, racially segregated graduation ceremonies and curricular requirements in
race theory and gender studies.
But if "diversity" were really the goal, then preferences would be given on the basis of unusual
characteristics, not on the basis of race. The underlying assumption -- that only minorities can add
certain ideas or perspectives -- is offensive not merely because it is untrue but also because it
implies that all minorities think a certain way.
What's gone wrong? The basic problem is that a racist past cannot be undone through more
racism. Race-conscious programs betray Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind community,
and the heightened racial sensitivity they cause is a source of acrimony and tension instead of
healing.
2012 AP ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE RESPONSE QUESTIONS
Source D
“Sizing Up Affirmative Action.” The Wilson Quarterly 25.1 (2001): 105. Gale
Student Resources in Context. Web. 23 Feb. 2012.
This source is from The Wilson Quarterly and attempts to determine the advantages and
disadvantages of affirmative action.
Does affirmative action in business and education, along with government "set-asides" for
minority firms, result, as many critics suggest, in poorer-performing employees, students, and
contract firms? In an overview of past research, and a new study of their own, Holzer and
Neumark, economists at Michigan State University, answer no on most counts.
Looking at more than 3,200 employers in Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles surveyed
between 1992 and 1994, Holzer and Neumark found that 56 percent used affirmative action in
recruiting. These firms attracted (not surprisingly) more minority and female job candidates,
screened them more intensively, were more likely to ignore educational or past employment
deficiencies or criminal records when they hired--and were more likely to provide training for
their new hires. These actions by employers apparently paid off: Subsequent performance ratings
showed that the minority and female workers did, if anything, better than white men.
Some 42 percent of the employers surveyed used affirmative action in hiring (as well as, for the
most part, in recruiting). Holzer and Neumark found that these firms were more likely to hire
women or minorities with lesser qualifications--but also to give them remedial training, thus
erasing the differences. Overall, affirmative action, while boosting employers' costs, did not
appear to result in weaker job performance.
2012 AP ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE RESPONSE QUESTIONS
Source E
Becker, Gary S., Thomas Sowell, Kurt Vonnegut, Walter Block, and Michael
Walker. Discrimination, Affirmative Action, and Equal Opportunity: An
Economic and Social Perspective. Vancouver, B.C., Canada: Fraser
Institute, 1982. Print.
The following passage is an excerpt from the book Discrimination, Affirmative Action, and Equal
Opportunity: An Economic and Social Perspective, edited by W.E. Block and M.A. Walker.
Ruining the talented
Affirmative action programs are disastrous for the competent minority person who would have
"made it" in the absence of any preferential treatment. Preferential treatment is destructive of the
person's self-image, for he will never know for sure whether he owes his promotion or acceptance
to his own merits or to the fact that he happens to be a member of a minority group. His peers
may not fully appreciate his accomplishments for similar reasons. And perhaps most importantly,
his abilities will be open to suspicion in the eyes of his customers, as we have seen in the case of
the Harvard University
Medical School.
Pushing down the downtrodden
Let it not be thought that this policy is partial to the talented; it harms the unqualified minority
person as well. When he is promoted to a position which calls for greater abilities than he has,
when he is accepted by a school with requirements far in excess of his abilities, when he is
pushed into a work situation "over his head," he is not the recipient of an advantage by any
means. True, proponents of affirmative action do not intend any such thing to occur, but there is
abundant evidence that it does. For example, says Roberts, the University of California Medical
School accepts minority group members in affirmative action programs with grades "lower than
the minimum required for white applicants."
2012 AP ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE RESPONSE QUESTIONS
Source F
Quindlen, Anna. "Public & Private; The Great White Myth." New York Times 15 Jan.
1992. Print.
The following editorial is taken from Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Anna Quindlen's New
York Times column "Public and Private".
Each generation finds its own reasons to hate. The worried young white men I've met on college
campuses in the last year have internalized the newest myth of American race relations, and it has
made them bitter. It is called affirmative action, a.k.a. the systematic oppression of white men.
All good things in life, they've learned, from college admission to executive position, are being
given to black citizens. The verb is ubiquitous: given.
Never mind that you can walk through the offices of almost any big company and see a sea of
white faces. Never mind that with all that has been written about preferential treatment for
minority law students, only about 7,500 of the 127,000 students enrolled in law school last year
were African-American. Never mind that only 3 percent of the doctors in this country are black.
Never mind that in the good old days preferential treatment was routinely given to brothers and
sons of workers in certain lines of work. Perceptions of programs to educate and hire more black
citizens as, in part, an antidote to decades of systematic exclusion have been inflated to enormous
proportions in the public mind. Like hot air balloons they fill up the blue sky of the American
landscape with the gaudy stripes of hyperbole. Listen and you will believe that the construction
sites, the precinct houses, the investment banks are filled with African-Americans.
Unless you actually visit them.
2012 AP ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE RESPONSE QUESTIONS
Source G
U.S. Department of Education, The Nation's Report Card: Fourth Grade Reading
2000, p.30-31 (2001).
The following graph is taken from a United Stated Department of Education report on fourth
grade reading ability.
2012 AP ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND COMPOSITION FREE RESPONSE QUESTIONS
Source H
Carnevale and Rose, Socioeconomic Status, Race-Ethnicity, and Selective College
Admissions, Century Foundation (forthcoming, March 2003)
The following graph provides data on the percentage of disadvantaged students admitted to
selective colleges across the nation.