EOC Exam Review

All students enrolled in English II are required to take the North Carolina End-of-Course (EOC) Test at the end of the semester. The English II EOC counts as the course's final exam. The grade for the final exam counts as 20% of the final grade for the semester.

Basic Information

· All English II students will be taking an end of course test provided by the State of North Carolina.

· This test will count as the final exam.

· This test will also be taken online.

· The test is 68 questions long (including constructed response questions).

· You will have 150 minutes to take the test.

What is on the test?

The following is a chart released by the Department of Public Instruction in North Carolina about what kinds of items will be on the test and how much of each type will appear on the test:

Standard Percentage of items on the test

Reading for Literature 30-34%

Reading for Information 32-38%

Writing (one paragraph responses) 14-18%

Language (grammar in the one paragraph responses) 14-18%

For the Reading for Literature and Information, you will be reading passages from literature, poems, and articles about various topics. You will answer multiple choice questions and constructed response questions (short paragraphs) about these different passages.

Multiple Choice Questions:

These questions may ask you to analyze the text by identifying or explaining any of the following concepts (this is not an exhaustive list) through multiple choice questions or constructed responses. Most often, you will be analyzing the use of literary terms, characters, the author’s choices, or the effect of something in the text.

Metaphors

Similes

Identify the structure of a text (the order of the ideas)

Identify the importance of the structure of the text

Connect ideas in the text

Identify tone and its importance to the theme

Theme

Author’s Purpose in writing the text

Rhyme Scheme and how it impacts theme

Synonyms

Antonyms

Meaning of a phrase of words

How the speaker or character changed in the text (character development)

Author’s Point of View (first period, third person limited, third person omniscient, etc.)

Personification

Infer information from the text about characters, plot, theme, etc.

Connotation

Conflict

Summarizing a text

Author’s craft—the purpose of specific word choice

The effect of word choice in a text

The central idea of a text

The purpose of figurative language in a text

Oxymoron

Allegory

Rhetorical questions and their purpose

Sense of entitlement

How the author refines ideas in the text

Constructed Responses:

To answer these questions, make sure that you do all of the following:

· Write in complete sentences, with periods at the end.

· Your topic sentence should include part of the prompt to show that you are addressing the question. It can also include a brief answer that you will explain with evidence in the following sentences. Get right to the point.

· After your topic sentence, you should then use specific examples from the text itself, quoting it, or referring to it, to back up your opinion stated in the topic sentence.

· You should use at least two examples from the text to develop your response. In many cases, you can’t receive the highest score on the constructed response unless you have at least two specific examples from the text.

· End your constructed response with a summary statement to give it a well-rounded feel as the scorer reads it.

· Each of your constructed responses will be scored on a scale from 0 to 2, with 2 being the highest score possible.

· Grammar will also affect your score, so make sure that you edit your responses.

· There will not be any spell check available, so you need to know how to edit your own work.

Taking an EOC Online:

· Remember to use the tools provided for you in the right way to benefit you. For example, just because there is a highlighting tool doesn’t mean that you should spend large amounts of time highlighting entire passages and then un-highlighting them just to amuse yourself.

· Stay focused on the screen and remember that you can mark questions to go back to later if you are stuck, so keep the test going. When you review your test, you can see which questions you marked or didn’t answer.

· Use the tools to mark out answers you know are incorrect so you can visualize the process of eliminating answers.

· People around you will have a different form of the test, so it won’t do you any good to look at someone else’s screen.

· If your eyes get tired while reading on the screen, give them a break by looking up at the ceiling, rubbing them, and then get back to work.

· Read all of the directions and questions twice to make sure that you know what you are doing.