The two assignments
Part A is half the exam and almost all of it is decided before you start writing — in what you decide to say, and in the twenty minutes you spend planning. Here is each assignment with a practice prompt, a worked plan, and what the scoring categories actually reward.
The practice prompts and sample texts here were written for this site. Alberta publishes real prompts and scored student exemplars — see the diploma prep page.
Assignment I: Personal Response
Worth 20%: Ideas and Impressions 10%, Presentation 10%. Suggested length 600–1200 words, in any prose or poetic form you choose.
Practice prompt. Read the following text.
The house had been sold for a month before she drove past it again. Someone had painted the door a colour she would never have chosen, and for a moment she was furious — as though the door were still hers to be consulted about. She drove on, and found she could not decide whether she had lost something or simply set it down.
The text suggests something about the difficulty of letting go of what we no longer own. What do you think it suggests about that idea? Support your response with reference to the text and to your own observations, experiences, and reading.
A worked plan
- My answer to the idea, in one sentence: we hold on to things not because we still want them but because giving them up means admitting we are someone different now.
- Connection to the text: the fury about the door — she is not angry about paint, she is angry that the world moved without asking her.
- My material: clearing my grandmother's kitchen and keeping a chipped mug nobody wanted; the hockey bag I have not opened in three years.
- Form: personal essay, because I want to move between two moments and reflect on both. A narrative would force me to pick one.
- The turn: realizing the bag is not about hockey. It is about the version of me who played, and that person is what I am actually storing.
- Ending: not a summary — the recognition that setting something down and losing it feel identical from the inside, which is the text's own uncertainty, arrived at honestly.
| Category | What a strong response does | What loses marks |
|---|---|---|
| Ideas and Impressions | Explores the idea rather than announcing a view; uses detail that genuinely develops the thinking; connects clearly to the text provided | Retelling the text; listing several thin examples; a response that never commits to anything |
| Presentation | A voice that sounds like a person; a form that suits the idea and is sustained; deliberate shape from opening to ending | A borrowed, flattened register; a form abandoned halfway; an ending that restates the prompt |
Watch out: the text is a way in, not the subject. A sentence or two placing your idea against it is plenty — the marks are for what you do with the idea afterwards.
Assignment II: Critical/Analytical Response
Worth 30%: Thought and Understanding 7.5%, Supporting Evidence 7.5%, Form and Structure 5%, Matters of Choice 5%, Matters of Correctness 5%. Suggested length 800–1600 words.
Practice prompt. Discuss the idea developed by the text creator about the ways an individual's choices are shaped by the expectations of others. Support your response with reference to a literary text you have studied.
Turning a prompt into a thesis, in three moves
- Make it a question about your text: in this play, whose expectations actually drive the choices, and what happens when the character meets them?
- Answer it in one sentence: the character acts on what he believes others expect of him, and each act narrows the range of choices still open to him.
- Add the because: … because every step taken to satisfy those expectations removes a relationship that might have offered him another option. That clause becomes the spine of the essay.
Thesis: The text presents expectation as something that operates by narrowing — each choice made to satisfy others removes an alternative, until the final decision is the only one left.
What a body paragraph should look like
- Topic sentence — a claim, not an event: the first decision is presented as a free one precisely so its consequences can look inevitable later.
- Set up the evidence in a clause: where in the text, and what is happening.
- Quote briefly, woven into your own sentence — a phrase, not a speech.
- Analyze: why those particular words support the claim. This sentence is where Thought and Understanding is earned.
- Connect back to the controlling idea before moving on.
A good check: read only your topic sentences. If they tell the story in order, the essay has drifted into summary. If they read as an argument, it has not.
| Category | What it rewards | Quickest way to lose it |
|---|---|---|
| Thought and Understanding | A perceptive reading of the text against the prompt's idea | Answering a different question than the one asked |
| Supporting Evidence | Specific, well-chosen detail that proves the claim | General references, or quotations left unexplained |
| Form and Structure | Organization that develops the argument | Paragraphs ordered by plot rather than by claim |
| Matters of Choice | Precise diction, varied sentences | Inflated vocabulary used imprecisely |
| Matters of Correctness | Control of grammar, punctuation, spelling | Tense slips out of the literary present; missing quotation marks |
Using the time
The idea: the exam is designed for three hours and allows six. Planning is not time taken away from writing — it is what makes the writing possible.
| Stage | Roughly | What you are doing |
|---|---|---|
| Read and think | 10–15 min | Read the text twice; underline the idea; write your one-sentence answer to it |
| Plan | 10 min | Material, form, shape, and where the turn goes |
| Write | Most of it | Follow the plan; if you depart from it, do so on purpose |
| Proofread | 5–10 min | Tense, quotation marks, titles, the sentences you wrote fastest |
Five minutes of proofreading is the best-value time on the paper: Matters of Correctness is 5% of the exam by itself, and tense and punctuation slips are the cheapest marks there are to give away.