Till We Have Faces is not on any official AP reading list, but the open question welcomes any work of literary merit, and a handful of students every year choose it. Those essays tend to land at the extremes: either a confident argument about narration and self-deception, or a plot retelling that never answers the prompt. Teachers who know what to expect can score both kinds quickly and fairly.

The current AP rubric splits the essay into three rows: thesis worth one point, evidence and commentary worth up to four, and sophistication worth one. A Lewis essay can earn the thesis point with a defensible claim about how Orual's accusation against the gods changes meaning once she tells the whole story. It cannot earn it by announcing that the book has themes of love and jealousy, since that restates the topic and takes no position.

Evidence and commentary is where most of the scoring effort goes. Students need specific moments from the novel, and they need to explain how those moments support the claim rather than simply placing a quotation next to an assertion. Because the book is long and the plot is unusual, many students lean on summary to remind the reader what happened, and the scoring guide is clear that summary does not count as commentary.

Matching the Novel to Common Prompt Types

Prompts about a character's complex motivation, an unreliable perspective, or a conflict between duty and desire all fit Orual naturally. Prompts about setting or social class fit less well, and a student who forces the novel into them usually ends up with a thin argument about Glome that ignores the real action. Part of fair grading is noticing when a student chose a weak match and reflecting that in the evidence score rather than the thesis score.

• Thesis names a specific claim about Orual, Psyche, or the gods, not just a theme
• Evidence comes from several parts of the book, including the late reversal
• Commentary explains how each detail supports the argument
• Paragraphs build on one another rather than repeating the same point
• The essay acknowledges a complication, such as Orual's sympathy alongside her possessiveness

Scoring Sophistication Consistently

The sophistication point is the hardest to apply, and graders disagree about it more than any other row. For this novel, a good working test is whether the essay sustains an understanding of the book's complexity, for instance by showing how Orual can be both a victim of grief and the author of harm. Essays that mention complexity once in the conclusion do not earn it, while essays that build their whole argument around a tension usually do.

It helps to set a team standard before the first stack is graded. Two teachers can read the same Lewis essay and split on this row simply because one expects more than the other, and sharing three or four anchor papers closes most of that gap. A short conversation over coffee saves a lot of grade appeals later. A shared document of agreed rulings, even a single page, keeps everyone aligned as the weeks go by.

Feedback That Helps Students Before the Exam

Practice essays are only useful if the comments change what students do on test day. Instead of writing "develop your analysis," point to one body paragraph and ask what claim the quotation proves and how a reader would know. Students can then practice a repeatable move, where every piece of evidence is followed by a sentence explaining its relevance to the thesis.

Timing matters too, because the actual exam gives forty minutes per essay. Teachers who assign the Lewis prompt as a timed write and then return comments within two days give students a real chance to revise the same argument under similar conditions. Waiting until the next unit to hand papers back means the feedback arrives after the practice has stopped being useful.

Handling the Volume of Practice Essays

AP teachers often assign several practice essays across a semester, and the grading adds up quickly. A shared rubric that mirrors the three-row structure lets a tool or a teaching assistant produce a first-pass score on each row, with the teacher reviewing the borderline cases. That keeps the scoring consistent from the first practice essay to the last. Students also benefit from seeing the row-by-row scores, because they learn which part of the rubric costs them the most points.

The review step is where the teacher's judgment matters most. A student who makes an unusual but well-defended argument about Orual's final vision may deserve credit that a rubric-matching pass would miss, so reading those papers closely is worth the time. The goal is to save hours on the predictable work and spend them on the essays that need a human reader.