Staff shares how to prepare for AP Exams

Arianna Peper
Junior Editor/Business Manager

Advanced Placement (AP) Exams will be taking place at the high school over a period of two weeks in May: May 6-10 and May 13-17.

According to College Board, AP Exams are designed to measure how well students have mastered the content and skills of a specific AP course and each exam is weighed on a scale out of five. Each test typically lasts three to four hours, and the structure of each test varies depending on the subject. However, the majority of tests include multiple-choice and free-response questions.

With that, it is often recommended that students take more time to study the material to have a better chance of earning a higher score.

AP United States History teacher Michael Weber said, “They should start [studying] now. I’ve told my classes to give themselves about a week for every unit we have in the course. So focus, study, and prep for the test for seven to eight weeks.”

Due to these exams being nationally administered tests, there are many different resources both online and in the classroom that are available for students to use.

AP Statistics teacher Justin Mathes said via email, “The best way to practice for the exam is by taking the old exams released by College Board. It is important to simulate testing conditions when practicing. Setting a timer to simulate time constraints, putting electronics away and trying to do the exam straight through with no breaks all better prepare you.”

Mathes added via email, “A three-hour exam can sometimes be an endurance test so replicating that can help you avoid feeling overwhelmed on test day.”

Online resources such as College Board or AP Classroom offer various ways students can study using things such as practice tests and video lessons.

In addition, Weber said, “If you can use Google, you can find an AP U.S. History study guide, and there are so many different ones out there that they fit everyone’s style. If you like videos and learn from videos– there’s a million of them. If you like brief outlines to kind of jog your memory— there’s a million of them.”

AP Chemistry teacher Jessica Michael-Lane said a student can start to prepare for the exam by “forcing yourself to do it and not just looking at it and saying, ‘I know how to do it’. Actually testing yourself to see if you know the information is really helpful.”

Along with studying for the exam, Weber and Michael-Lane agreed that students should focus on maintaining healthy habits such as getting enough sleep and nutrition.

“Focus on your nutrition; focus on your sleep. It might not seem like that matters but it does,” Weber said.

According to the National Institutes of Health, earning enough sleep has been found to be correlated to higher test scores.

By taking an AP Exam, if a student scores well enough, they have the ability to earn college credit (depending on the course and the minimum score their college requires). These exams also help students prepare for the college workload through the amount of studying beforehand.

Mathes also agreed that taking the exam could have many benefits for students.

“Ninety-five percent of our students have scored a 3 or higher (passing) since we started the AP Stats course. Over the past three years our students have averaged a 4.3 on the exam, compared to the national average of 2.89. It’s a great opportunity to showcase nine months of hard work and earn college credit at the same time,” Mathes said via email.

“Advice that I would give is to take it seriously. It’s not a regular test so the way that you prepare for your unit tests might not be enough for this one– for an AP Exam– because of the length,” Weber said.

Weber added, “It takes endurance to do well on this test, you’ve got to be locked in for over three hours so my advice is to take the process very seriously and do not cram; start [studying] now and do it a little bit at a time.”