Often, free resources are often the best ones as long as you know how to use them, and AP classes and exams are no different.
Over the last decade, Advanced Placement ® Exams (AP ® Exams) have become an integral part of many high school student’s experiences. For 2020’s online-administered exams, over 4.6 million exams were taken despite the heavy criticism that CollegeBoard © had received in response to technological difficulties many students had suffered from. Nevada’s participation has increased rapidly, with the State Department of Education announcing in 2017 that Nevada had showcased the largest three-year and one-year increase in the percentage of students scoring three or higher in the nation.
Despite the large increase in students taking and succeeding in the AP program, the exams are not without fault and share many of the same characteristics and criticisms that many national standardized exams face. A large criticism of AP exams has been equity, with students who are able to afford expensive prep books or private tutors often scoring higher than students who are less fortunate as well as not all students having access to AP courses to their school. In addition, AP exams often require students to study for the exam as opposed to content in order to succeed. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened equity issues as seen during last May’s administration, and online learning models may potentially increase the barriers some students may face when taking these classes.
Nevertheless, there are many online resources available to help maximize a student’s potential to succeed in classes and on the exams that can be accessed for free. Here are some resources that I personally found to be helpful while preparing for the exams and complement what you’ll learn at school as well as how to maximize their use.
Resource 1: Course Overview – Free
On CollegeBoard’s website for the AP program, there are free course overviews that are available for each of their AP exams. Using this resource is often extremely helpful when studying for STEM exams or exams that have gone through major changes in content or structure (i.e. AP World History: Modern). In these Course Overviews, CollegeBoard provides a section breakdown for each section in each unit and details exactly what material will be tested on the exam. By using this free resource, students can not only have a better grasp of the overall syllabus for the course, but also specifically pinpoint content that is required for success in the exam and in class. Additionally, it’s often helpful to skim over each unit and section before you cover the content in class, to develop a small understanding of the content and make the concepts familiar.
A strategy that I found particularly useful when studying for last year’s AP Chemistry and AP Calculus BC was printing out the Course At a Glance resource that is available on the Course Overview. I would check off each section on the page to ensure that I mastered every topic that could possibly appear on the exam the first time while learning it in school and another time during my review. This also helps students cover and study topics that the school may not cover and also develop a further understanding of the content.
To access the Course Overview, a Google search of the AP exam (i.e. Search AP Biology) will lead you to the AP exam’s page on the CollegeBoard website. There, they will have a PDF of the overview available.
Tip: Many schools often teach the numerical aspects of science courses such as AP Physics and AP Chemistry extremely well, helping answer questions on free response-questions with relative ease. However, for both the Multiple Choice and the majority of the free response-questions, the focus is often conceptual, which may be not as thoroughly examined in most high school AP Classes. Many courses have gone through restructuring in order to help promote the application of concepts as opposed to rote memorization, which is why many exams have become heavily conceptual in recent years. By using the Course Overview, you can cover what conceptual concepts are required to do well both in the class and on the exam.