AP US HISTORY



AP US HISTORY EXAM Tips:

1, Study big on colonial America - when it's exam time. You'll need the reminder.

2. Study Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Franklin Roosevelt. The multiple choice section will have an endless number of questions on these guys regardless of what version of the test you're taking.

3. Look at old DBQs in your given time frame to figure out what's not going to be the DBQ topic. (see below)

4. If you don't know anything about the topic of a DBQ, try to use information in the documents to make it sound well synthesized. Don't say anything that you don't know for certain.

5. If you're doing a free response question and you can't remember the name of something you're using for an example, just say something like, "A specific law in (year) said blah blah blah." For example, If you couldn't remember the name of the Wabash Case so I said, "A Supreme Court case during this time period ruled that an individual state..."

6. Don't spend too much time on free-response questions prep. The best idea is to

spend 5 minutes by brainstorming specific outside info for your subtopics, write your

thesis down and a couple of opening sentences down in your planning time on the

booklet to get ahead.

Some specifics about the AP US History exam:

1. Multiple-choice. You will have 55 minutes to complete 80 multiple-choice questions with five answer choices each. The questions are ordered in ascending order of difficulty; the first third are fairly easy, the middle third are intermediate, and the last third is difficult. Also, the questions are in chronological groups of eight; that is, there will be eight or nine questions moving from early American history to late American history, and then the next one will jump backwards in time. When you move from a question on Reaganomics to a question on the Intolerable Acts, you've hit a new section.

About guessing on multiple-choice: You probably should. Yes, there is a -1/4 point penalty for an incorrect answer, but you will almost always be able to eliminate at least one, and usually two or three incorrect answers. Only leave the question blank if you have absolutely no idea.

What they won't be about: Military history will never be the subject of a multiple-choice question. (Caveat scholasticus: On the 2002 AP exam, one of the questions asked which Revolutionary War battle convinced the French that the rebels were deserving of French aid. This is military history, but it's military history in a greater context, so they thought it was fine. You have been warned.) Also, there will be no so-called "Trivial Pursuit" questions—questions which ask you to recall only the name of a treaty or tariff, without any kind of context.

2 & 3. DBQ and Free-Response Essays. You will have 2 hours to write these three essays. Note: There are two test booklets for this part. The first contains only the essay questions and documents, and the second is the one that you write the essays in. For the first fifteen minutes, you can't write anything in the actual essay booklet; you can only read the essay questions and documents and write outlines in the margins of the question booklet. The remaining time is yours to divvy up as you see fit amongst the three essays, although your proctor will tell you the suggested intervals at which you should move on to the next essay (45 minutes of writing for the DBQ, and 30 for both planning and writing each of the free-response essays).

The DBQ: You will be given a "big-picture" question and 9 short primary source documents to cite as evidence in your response. The documents could be political cartoons, or speeches from Presidents and other politicians, or diary excerpts... you get the idea. You'll be given the documents in chronological order—Document A will have been written the earliest, while Document I will be the latest. Citing most (or better yet, all) of the documents is important, but it is critical that you also bring in your own knowledge about the time period.

Also, be sure to define your terms—anything subjective, like "progressive" or "liberal" or "isolationist". Five paragraphs is the suggested length of a DBQ: an introductory paragraph, in which you state your thesis; three evidence paragraphs, and a conclusion, in which you state your thesis again, and (for bonus points!) tie the essay topic into some modern-day issue.

SOME RECENT DBQ TOPICS

2008: Vietnam and American society 1964-1975

2007: Farmers and Agricultural prices /Populism 1865-1900

2006: Change in the Status and Roles of Women 1770-1860

2005: The American Revolution and Changes to American Society 1775-1800

2004: The French and Indian War Alters the Relationship Between Britain and her American Colonies 1754-1763

2003:  New Deal: Responses of President Roosevelt to the Great Depression 1929- 1941

2002: Reform Movements, 1825-1850

2001: The Cold War and the Eisenhower Administration 1948-1961

2000: Organized Labor from 1875-1900

1999:  Colonial America on the Eve of the Revolution 1750-1776

1998: Jeffersonian Republicans and Federalists with Respect to the Constitution 1801-1817

1997: American Women, 1890-1925

1996: Constitutional and Social Developments, 1860-1877

1995: Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1969

The free-response essays:

These are arguably the hardest part of the exam: unlike the multiple-choice (where you have process of elimination on your side) and the DBQ (where you have lots of documents to jump-start your recollection of a possibly obscure topic), everything you write about has to be from your memory alone. Fortunately, these essays will be relatively straightforward; the analysis need not be nearly as in-depth as in the DBQ. You'll be given four essay questions in total, in two groups of two; you must pick one from each group. The first group will be from the pre-Civil War era, and the second will be from the Civil War to the 1970s, although you are virtually guaranteed not to get an essay from your DBQ period. Four or five paragraphs each should suffice for these essays.

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