Seven. Seven APs, and a whole host of finals for almost all my classes, too. That’s what I had to look forward to this month. Fellow upperclassmen know this feeling all too well. It’s the part of the year that everyone dreads the most, and mastering it is the key to not sinking in the stress that May brings.
To start, there’s what you can do during the school year. My honest advice is this: really pay attention to the AP practice that you do in class. Yes, it can be pretty boring, and most teachers here aren’t incorporating it into your grades, but the knowledge you gain is crucial. At some point, the key to many APs is not really how well you know the subject material: it’s how well you know the test.
Here’s something to illustrate my point. I just took AP Macroeconomics, and one common question asks what the Federal Reserve should do to alleviate a downturn. To anyone with a knowledge of economics, “decrease interest rates” would be a perfectly good answer. But on the AP exam, it’s not. You have to say “decrease administered rates” to get the point. This difference comes down to the semantics of the College Board, and for someone who hasn’t done enough AP-specific practice, it could easily be an important point lost.
Engaging yourself with AP practice, for this reason, is absolutely crucial. If you want an extra head start, you can look online at AP Classroom or ask your teacher for resources. Not only will they provide you good practice for your class, but you’ll slowly become accustomed to the questions and grading style of the AP exam. It’s not too different from the SAT and ACT, where learning the test itself can be just as important as studying the material it covers.
And then there comes the end-of-year grind, where finals and APs converge to make a few weeks of your life truly hell. There’s no cure for it, but preparing early will make it a lot less painful. For the best-prepared, the APs will be more like a confirmation of prior learning than a nerve-wracking experience.
There’s the typical advice: sleep enough the night before, get a good breakfast, and don’t spend too long on one question. These are all true pieces of advice, but APs have more specific quirks to them. The process of elimination is almost more useful than just finding the correct answer for multiple choice sections, with modern exams typically having only one to two answers that could plausibly be correct, given that you know the material.
For free response, the grading system is very rigid. Points are given out for a very specific explanation or equation, and not for any others. While this puts pressure on you to write the answer they want, it means you can also game the system to guarantee yourself a point. If you include the exact equation, or exact phrase — remember “administered rates”? — that they’re looking for, there’s no way they can take credit away from you. Congratulations. You just beat the game.
Balancing this all with exams going on day after day is definitely not easy. But sometimes the best you can do is take it one at a time, and study in advance for the ones you will have a harder time with. There’s no true “hardest” exam, and so each person should study based on their own needs.
Finals will be right around the same too, but luckily, a lot of them will be like mock AP exams, making my previous advice apply to them, too. Try not to get lost in the haze of all these tests. When you’re done taking one, whether it went well or went poorly, just move on to preparing for the next.
For those of you underclassmen who are anxious about APs, don’t worry too much. I didn’t take my first one until last year, and it was only one relatively easy one. You’ll learn as you go, and with the right preparation in advance, the exams should go smoothly and largely follow your expectations.
On the whole, your teachers will prepare you well. You’ll receive opportunities to practice AP material and similar questions, and so how much you need to prepare is really up to what you think is the hardest class.
APs also aren’t the end of the world —remember, their value lies in letting you skip courses in college. They’re not definitive markers of how good you are at a subject, and colleges won’t treat it as such.
As a junior, I get to enjoy a couple more final exams this year, and then I have to do the whole thing all over again next year. I know I’ve learned a lot, and I hope this guide helped you just a bit, too.
