It’s October, you got your first in-class essay back, and the teacher’s incomprehensible marks seem to indicate you don’t know what’s going on. Or maybe it’s April, AP season is quickly approaching, and you have no idea how to review the centuries that buzzed by your head in quick succession.
Here are some tips to ensure you do your best, whether you’re taking APUSH, AP World, or AP Euro.
1. Understand the exam
The AP History exams seek to evaluate your ability to understand, analyze, and synthesize historical evidence. The focus is less on remembering individual names, dates, and places, and more on understanding the development of historical processes. The exam will give you most of the concrete facts you need (who, what, when, and where), and it is then up to you to explain why and how things changed or stayed the same. Knowing historical facts will help you write, especially for the free response question, but it will be less useful for the multiple-choice section, which makes up the largest portion of your score (40%). When you study, focus most of your energy on understanding the big picture. After you read, try explaining what you just went over to someone else. This will help you remember what you’ve learned and recognize what you need to review.
2. Prioritize
Ideally, you will review everything on the exam throughout your AP course. If you find yourself in a time crunch as the exam approaches, though, it’s important to note that the APUSH and AP World exams (but not AP Euro) assign more emphasis to certain time periods than to others. For APUSH, this is quite dramatic: between 60 and 86% of the questions will focus on the period between 1754 and 1980. It’s less uneven for AP World, where between 48 and 60% of the questions will focus on the period between 1450 and 1900. This means that in your review for APUSH, you should focus mainly on the period between the Revolution (1776) and Reagan’s election (1980). For AP World, focus on the period between the Byzantine collapse (1453) and the Berlin Conference (1884). For AP Euro, note that all periods, including the present day, are weighted equally, so you should distribute your efforts.
3. Write efficiently
The AP History exams are not writing exams. Style is not important, so long as the grader can understand you. You will be writing under time pressure, so make sure you know the rubric, and hit every element of it, even if the introduction, transitions, and conclusion are clunky. In fact, neither the introduction nor the conclusion are required. For both essays, the categories are thesis, contextualization, evidence, and analysis. You must have an easily identifiable thesis in the beginning or end, and you must reference the historical situation of the prompt.
You can receive up to 7 points on the DBQ, and up to 6 on the long essay—the extra point comes from the evidence category, and you can earn it by incorporating outside information. Still, the bulk of the points on the DBQ come from writing about the documents; if you simply cite at least three documents, you get one point for evidence, and if you use at least four documents to support an argument, you get two points. Ideally, cite as many documents as you can; so long as four of them support an argument, you get two points for evidence, even if the extra documents are superfluous. The analysis category for the DBQ requires that you provide in-depth analysis for at least two documents to get one point, or for four documents to get two points. To do this, remember SOAP: Source, Occasion, Audience, Purpose. For each document you cite, make sure you mention one of these characteristics and relate it to the argument you’re making.
For the long essay, you only need to incorporate two pieces of information into your argument to get both evidence points, but you need four pieces of information to get the second analysis point. To be safe, make sure you get at least one point in each category. For the DBQ, this means you must cite at least three documents, and you must relate at least two of them to SOAP. For the long essay, you must use two pieces of information. Once you have the basics down on both essays, use any extra time you have to polish them off and get every point possible.
4. Wherever you are in your AP History review process, be sure to take care of yourself!
Sleep, eat, drink water, and try to enjoy the marvel of learning about how people lived their lives in centuries past.
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