How to Ace your AP Exams

Since the College Board discontinued SAT Subject Tests in 2021, AP exams have become even more important data points in the selective college admissions process. Even as schools have gone test-optional (meaning applicants don’t have to submit SAT/ACT scores), APs are still expected if your school offers AP-level courses (and a way to set yourself apart if your school doesn’t!)

Remember that just because a high school doesn’t offer a certain AP, it doesn’t mean you can’t prepare to take the AP exams yourself. Although this will take a significant amount of time and effort, Top Tier Admissions tutors can help you create a personalized test prep strategy.

Stressed about APs? Unsure how to prepare? Follow these Top Tips suggested by Top Tier Admissions’ exam experts, and you’ll shine in May.

TOP TIPS TO ACE YOUR AP EXAMS

1. START NOW

Your exam might not be until mid-May, but starting your prep in earnest in early April (or earlier) will both improve your performance and reduce your stress. And don’t forget, you SHOULD be prepping all year, right along with your AP course instruction!

2. TAKE OWNERSHIP OF YOUR AP PREP

Begin by reminding yourself why you are taking the exam(s). Are you strengthening your academic profile to stand out in admissions? Will you use your AP scores to place into advanced coursework or test out of requirements in college?

Many students choose these exams because they already like the material. By reminding yourself that you enjoy the stuff that’s on the test, you can make prep feel less like torture and a little more like (dare I say it?) fun!

Remember: your score is yours, not your teacher’s or your school’s (although both will pat themselves on the back when you succeed!). Every year, students earn 5s who are in struggling AP programs or who aren’t enrolled in AP courses. At the same time, there are always students in well-established AP programs who earn 1s and 2s. It’s all about the prep you put in.

AP courses correspond to year-long college courses, but high school teachers have less than a year to cover this material. Even the most experienced, efficient teachers often have trouble covering all of the course content, let alone reviewing or preparing students for the exam. Prepping along with your coursework and independent self-studying are key! Tens of thousands of students have successfully prepared for AP exams on their own and with tutors, even when they aren’t enrolled in official AP courses.

3. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OFFICIAL AP RESOURCES

Familiarize yourself with the official AP resources that the College Board makes available to test takers. 

The free response questions from each year’s exams are available online on AP Central, along with grading rubrics, answer keys, and sample responses with commentary. You will find these sample responses most helpful for exams that include essays or oral presentations. Since the rubrics for these questions tend to be vague, seeing how AP “readers” (the college and high school faculty who grade the exams) have evaluated previous test-takers’ work, will show you what excellent, satisfactory, and weak responses look like. At a minimum, make sure to skim through the last few years’ free response questions to get to know the exam style, format, and content. Don’t forget to add any content you didn’t recognize, or questions that would have stumped you, to your review list!

The College Board is much stingier about sharing multiple-choice questions with the public, but you may be able to access sample multiple-choice questions by Googling or by asking your AP teacher (AP teachers have access to AP Classroom, which includes practice multiple-choice questions; their students can also sign up). 

And don’t forget about the Course and Exam Description! The APUSH Course and Exam Description, for example, contains 17 multiple-choice questions based on five representative passages ranging from the colonial era to the late 20th century. Although these multiple-choice questions aren’t enough, on their own, to guide your content review plan, they will give you a better sense of the exam format, difficulty level, and the kinds of knowledge and reasoning required. 

The Course and Exam Description also provides a detailed list of course and exam content by “unit.” Regardless of whether or not your teacher followed these units (or you’re self-studying), skimming through the Description will give you a birds-eye view of the course material and a sense of what you understand well, feel shaky on, or haven’t covered at all.

The last resource to consider: AP Daily Videos. In these videos, which are available on AP Classroom and the Advanced Placement YouTube account (yes, there’s a YouTube account you can follow for purely scholarly purposes), experienced AP teachers give mini-lectures on course content and walk students through sample exam questions. If your teacher is already covering the material in class, watch these videos as a painless form of content review; if your teacher isn’t (or you are self-studying), watch even more carefully, and take notes!

4. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF UNOFFICIAL AP RESOURCES

AP review books are an inexpensive and worthwhile investment. Traditionally, Barron’s and Princeton Review cornered the market in bookstores, but some impressive competitors available on Amazon, such as the Five Steps to a 5 series, have recently started giving Barron’s and PR a run for their money. Review books contain broad surveys of course content—valuable for turbo-reviewing material—and practice tests. 

Remember: none of these practice tests are official, and their quality varies. Use the practice tests as part of your review, especially if you’ve used up the official multiple-choice and free-response questions, but if you see anything that seems inconsistent with the official materials or what you have learned from a standard textbook, take it with a (large) grain of salt. 

If you’d rather review content with videos, you’re in luck; a number of high school and college teachers have uploaded (unofficial) AP review videos onto YouTube and other platforms.  If you’d like to learn more about a given topic, Googling “topic” + “AP exam” will usually direct you to something useful (again, with the caveat that unofficial resources vary in quality). For memorization-heavy subjects (e.g., Biology), consider purchasing a set of flash cards (Barron’s and other companies produce them) and flipping through them in your spare time.

5. WORK WITH A TTA EXPERT TUTOR

There’s a lot of test-taking strategy that comes with taking AP tests. For instance, getting the correct answer is only 1 point, whereas showing your work can be 80% of all the points allocated to a singular problem. The strategic element is commonly overlooked because students only focus on getting the question “correct.”

To understand the most successful test-taking strategies (these are VERY different than typical SAT/ACT test strategies), Top Tier Admissions’ expert tutors can help. Working one-on-one, we will immediately identify the best official and unofficial resources for a given exam, diagnose your strong and weak content areas, and work with you to develop a review and exam prep schedule tailored to your needs – on your schedule!  We will be in your corner from your first session to the exam day, making sure that you work hard, work smart, and stay relaxed.

Good luck in May!