Historian appalled at the ignorance of students taking the AP exam in US history

I have just returned from my annual sojourn to Louisville, where I spent seven days reading Advance Placement essays in U.S. History for the Educational Testing Service.  (To learn more about the exam, see the link below.)

There are always some entertaining moments reading these essays, such as the student who described Reconstruction as “when the North wanted to piss-off the South,” or the one who said that “it was when people started eating black-eyed peas and chicken was fried.”  But, to be honest, those moments are rare.

There was the student who wrote an essay about how she (my guess based on the handwriting) had gotten into the wrong crowd and gone from an A student to a D student.  She openly confessed her mistakes and said her mother would be proud of her remorse, but not the fact she was blowing-off the AP Exam, which costs almost a $100 these days.