Anonymous wrote:DS and most kids in his circle took Lang in 11th and Lit in 12th - it's the most common pathway for good students at his large public high school. He thought Lang was very easy and got a 5, but struggled so much with the open-ended nature of Lit that he decided not to take the exam... and he knew his chosen major at the colleges that had accepted him wouldn't give him credit for a top score on that exam, anyway. However the benefit was noting on his college applications in the fall of senior year, that he was taking AP Lit.
DS has high-functioning autism, and even though his verbal cognitive skills are sky-high, he can be mentally rigid. I wonder if that played into his struggle with parsing literary texts in AP Lit? Other kids in his circle didn't seem to find such a contrast in the level of difficulty between the two classes, and did well in both.
ASD leads to much better performance on informational literal texts than fictional figurative texts.