AP Tips: Prioritize and Memorize

Those gross pesky nasty things called AP exams are just on the horizon. While I’m rather skeptical of their actual value, the fact is that you’re paying a lot of money for them and its deeply ingrained in us that we must study for all of our exams.

So as someone who took TEN AP exams in high school (and got 4s and 5s on all of them) here are my two biggest tips for sitting for APs.

Number 1: Prioritize

           

Many of us take 2-5 exams a year, and for many it’s just not possible to do amazingly well on that many comprehensive, difficult exams in such a short period of time (college finals do not really understand this).
So if you’re sitting for more than one AP exam, I would highly encourage you to rank them in order of importance, and study accordingly.

Lets say, hypothetically, you are attending a school/looking at schools that take only 5s as credit (word to the wise, taking higher placement is largely useless and/or hurting yourself).
You are signed up for 5 exams: Micro, Lit, Calc AB, Environmental Science, and Psychology. 

So your goal should be to get as many 5s as possible, but if you spread out the studying equally, you probably won’t get any.

So what do you do? You evaluate your chances to maximize the 5s.
You know you are a poor writer, so a 5 on AP Lit is very unlikely as the essay is such a big part of the grade. So you decide to bite the bullet on that one and do not study at all.

You are very good at Calc and are confident about your abilities to do well, but you know you’ll need to spend time studying formulas, and go in and get a bit of tutoring done for some of the trickier part of the course. It takes a good amount of time, but not spending time on Lit has freed that up.

You like environmental science, psychology, and micro, but you also know that they’re all very vocab heavy tests. You decide that you are the least likely to get a 5 in micro, just off of your class performance, and will study for environmental and psychology instead.

What is that, they’re vocab heavy? Huh?

Most AP exams (outside of math and English) live and die on vocabulary terms. While you want to make sure you have core concepts and formulas down (particularly in economics and sciences) the majority of multiple-choice questions come down to do you know what this is? So make an effort to really drill that vocab, it will help.
This is also true on the essays, where often you will need to understand causes and effects, but knowing what something is will help you answer it.

So when you’re taking AP exams, especially if you’re taking a lot of them, prioritize the exams, and study the vocab.