Hey guys! In this video we're going to go over 37 actionable FRQ tips and test taking
strategies to help you in AP World History.
This is part two of two, so if you haven't watched our prior video on the five-step strategy
to writing effective AP World History FRQs, be sure to first check out that video.
This video is going to be a list of tips, so if you find it helpful to pull up a written
version of these tips, be sure to click the blog post in the video description to follow
along.
Without further ado, let's get started.
The first tip that we have for you is to make sure that you're being smart about when you're
reviewing your textbook for your FRQs.
There is so much content covered in AP World History that is impossible to read every page
again and again.
So be sure to reference helpful resources that you've made over the course of the year,
such as your outlines, your notes from your textbook, and if you didn't take outlines
or notes from their textbook, there are tons of AP World History teachers as well as students
that have uploaded their notes if you just do a simple Google search for AP World History
unit X notes.
These are super helpful for you to provide a baseline for you as you start reviewing
for your exam.
Our second tip is to make sure that you're prioritizing chronology and periodization
over specific dates.
Students often make the mistake of emphasizing specific dates to their memory as opposed
to understanding the major themes of different time periods, so be sure to understand what's
happening before and after each major time period because that will also help you later
on in your DBQ and LEQ to earn the contextualization point.
That leads us to tip number three, which is to focus on the themes of AP World History.
Think about how things are interacting with one another.
This directly relates back to the ability to discuss and explain when it comes to SAQ
questions, which are very, very important because the SAQs often are asking you about
things such as continuity and change over time.
The fourth tip that we have for you is to make sure that you are remembering the ACE
acronym when you're writing your SAQs.
The A stands for answer the question.
C stands for cite your evidence and E stands for explaining your evidence and how it connects
to your response.
The fifth tip is to familiarize yourself with the categories of analysis that you'll be
asked in your SAQs.
These are most commonly things such as economic questions, demographic, political, cultural
or social questions.
So these are commonly assessed not just in the SAQs but also in the DBQ and LEQs.
Tip number six is to know your time periods.
Readers often emphasize that students make mistakes and periodization by bringing in
supporting evidence that is outside of the time period being asked of them, so don't
make this mistake.
Tip seven connects back to our prior tip in that students often struggle with periodization
when the question asks them from two different time periods.
This happened as recently as the 2019 exam so you need to be prepared for this scenario
to talk about both of those time periods.
Tip eight is to be wary of what the College Board calls catch phrases.
These are popular terms such as checks and balances or serial murderers and the reason
why you need to be careful here is because it has led students off tangents writing about
something that the question is not asking them such as the death penalty or the criminal
justice system.
Tip nine is to make sure that you are practicing how to link your secondary sources to your
course content.
This is a skill that students struggle mightily with and it is a vital part of doing well
in the SAQs.
Tip 10 is to focus a lot of your prep time on the E in the ACE acronym.
Students often struggle here because they don't connect the dots as to what they're
presenting and how that connects improves their point.
What they'll do instead is they'll simply restate the prompt or they'll indirectly answer
the question without actually showing how it supports causation, comparison or change
and continuity over time.
Our final tip when it comes to tackling the SAQs is to make sure that you're using words
such as whereas in contrast to or likewise, when you're drawing comparisons in your SAQs,
this is a really easy way to signal for your reader that you understand historical reasoning
skills.
Alright, so we've gone over 11 SAQ tips for AP World History.
If you found this helpful so far, be sure to like and subscribe to our channel for more
of this helpful content and leave a comment in the description as to which tip you found
most helpful for the SAQs.
Now let's talk about the DBQ.
In this section, we're going to go over 22 DBQ tips, which is a lot, so if at any point
you need to take a break, just hit the pause button.
Let's get started.
Our first tip is to make sure that before you start planning your DBQ, you're double
checking the time period.
What this means is that if it's saying something about the 20th century, that's anything from
1901 to 2000 or the 18th century, that would be 1701 to 1800 students due to test day stress,
sometimes confuse time periods and start writing about something that is outside the scope
of the time period being asked of them.
The second tip is to make sure that you remember that when it comes to your thesis, you only
make a point if your thesis is a defensible one, right?
This means that you can't just restate the prompt or reword the prompt and hope to get
the point here.
The third tip relates to our prior tip, which is when it comes to the thesis, remember the
formula, although X, ABC, therefore Y.
In this situation X is going to be your counterpoint or your counterargument.
ABC is going to be your supporting evidence and then therefore why is going to be your
argument.
This is a really simple thesis formula to make sure that you always have a thesis that
has a clear line of reasoning.
Number four if you don't like the formula we just shared another way that you can make
sure that you have a very clear thesis is by using the word because or therefore.
This will make sure that this is something that can be argued or agreed or disagreed
upon.
Which leads us to our fifth tip, which is you can always double check if your thesis
is a good one based on whether or not it can be agreed or disagreed upon.
With tip six is that some AP World History teachers recommend that students put contextualization
in their introductory paragraph that way, don't forget about it later.
Tip seven when it comes to AP World documents, remember the acronym HAPP.
This will help you tackle what you need for describing what's happening and how you source
them.
It stands for historical content, audience purpose, and then point of view.
Tip number eight is that you only earn one point for describing at least three documents,
so don't spend your entire DBQ describing every document: you won't get any more points
for that.
Instead tip number nine the second part of that point is to make sure that you can tie
the evidence that you're bringing up in your descriptions to support your thesis.
This is where the second point comes in when it comes to supporting the documents and evidence
section.
So remember if you use six documents to support your argument or thesis, you will earn that
second point.
And also if you feel unsure about how you interpreted one document, it's always helpful
to go ahead and interpret the seventh as backup.
Past readers have given this as a tip in order to help you earn that second point.
Tip 11 the easiest way to always make sure that you are using the document to support
your thesis is to remember the word "therefore".
What this means is that you can use sentence structures such as X, Y, Z, therefore ABC.
XYZ would be where you describe the document and then ABC is going to be where you tie
the document and what you're describing to your thesis to support and advance your argument.
Tip 12: remember that in order to earn your contextualization point for outside evidence,
you need to bring in something that is relevant to your thesis as well as from the same time
period.
Sometimes students make the mistake of providing something of outside evidence, but it's outside
of the time period being asked of them.
Speaking of that, tip 13 is that the easiest way to earn that contextualization point is
to describe what happened in AP World History in the time period immediately before the
time period that you're being assessed on.
Tip 14: make sure that you build the habit of grouping your documents.
It's really nice when students are able to group them into two or three categories and
their responses because it demonstrates higher order thinking versus an approach in which
the students just saying in Document 1 XYZ, in Document 2 XYZ and so on.
It demonstrates the student's ability to create a coherent argument that draws from multiple
sources.
Building on that tip, remember to refer to the authors of the documents and not just
the document number.
This will help you keep that HAPP acronym in mind.
When you're thinking about that historical content audience or point of view.
Tip 16: make sure that your DBQ supporting paragraphs have topic sentences.
This will allow you to build a comprehensive argument instead of just jumping a reader
from one data point to the next data point of support.
The next tip is to remember that when you're trying to earn your sourcing point that you
ask yourself, who is this document written for?
What's the intent of this author?
What might this document have accomplished?
Why did the author say this and this certain way, and this will allow you to always be
thinking about how what you're bringing up connects them back to your thesis.
Remember, in order to earn the sourcing point, you need to do so for at least three documents.
We recommend doing more than three just to be safe.
Three more tips.
Tip number 19 is to not ask for additional documents.
This is an old tip that AP World History teachers have continued to share with their students
over time and it is an outdated tip.
As recently as 2018 fifteen to twenty percent of student responses asked for additional
documents when that is not necessary for today's DBQs.
Tip 20 is related to the complexity point.
The easiest way to score your complexity point is to always do the opposite historical thinking
skill than what you're being asked.
What do we mean by that?
Well, if you're being asked, for example, to talk about change over time, you're going
to want to discuss continuity over time in your complexity instance.
The College Board describes this as explaining relevant and insightful connections within
and across periods or for example, if you're being asked to write about comparison, you're
going to want to talk about contrast.
The College Board describes this as explaining both similarity and difference and if you're
being asked to talk about causation, then you might want to discuss the effects in your
complexity instance.
And finally, another way to earn the complexity point is to go ahead and try to apply your
argument to another time period and draw connection.
If you do this, keep in mind that you have to apply your entire document to the other
time period.
Building on tip 20, Tip 21 is to remember that when you are earning the complexity point
right, you have to remember that it needs to be integrated into your entire argument
and not just a brief phrase or reference.
The College Board is looking for you to explain why you're including something in your response.
And our last tip for the DBQ is a helpful way to cue your reader into the fact that
you're trying complexity and that's to use words such as another time or another way
or another view.
This essentially cues your reader in that you're trying to draw in that opposing historical
thinking skill than what's being asked of you in the prompt.
Alright, so we've covered a ton of DBQ tips.
Now we've got a couple of LEQ tips, so let's go ahead and review those.
By the way, as I mentioned at the end of the SAQ section, if you found this video helpful
so far, leave a comment as to which tip you found most helpful because we'd like to hear
from you and also it helps other students find this video.
The last four tips that we have are related to the LEQ section and our first one is to
remember that you have to be comfortable with all the types of the LEQs.
Again, these are the core historical skills such as causation, comparison and change continuity
over time.
Our second tip is to remember that just like the DBQ, you have to understand where your
points are coming from in the LEQ.
A lot of the points are very similar to the DBQ.
For example, you're going to earn a point for having a clear historically defensible
thesis or a claim that has a clear line of reasoning.
You're also going to earn points for contextualization.
So remember that tip earlier that we gave him the DBQ section in order in terms of providing
that early on in your response.
When it comes to doing this, we recommend to do in AP World History is to mention something
that happened two to five decades or 20 to 50 years before the time period that you're
writing about.
Finally, remember that there are two points for analysis.
The first one is for answering the historical thinking skill that's been asked of you in
the prompt.
Again, this is always going to be something related to comparing, evaluating causation
or exploring change and continuity over time.
And the second one is for having that complexity that we talked about with the DBQ.
Tip three is to remember that when it comes to writing your LEQ practice, go ahead and
write your sample response.
Then set aside a dedicated time period for you to use your class notes and provide additional
specific evidence that you could have used at that time when you were practicing your
LEQ.
This'll help build your habit of making sure that all the evidence that you have is very
specific and helpful to your reader.
Lastly, when it comes to familiarizing yourself with how to write for the contextualization
point, the easiest way to do so is to look at the last five years worth of past exam
responses and see how sample responses were graded.
This will tell you what did and did not earn the point.
Three more resources for you to check out as you start to prep for your AP world exam.
The first one is AP Central, which has those past FRQ as well as scoring guidelines, Chief
Reader Reports and sample student responses.
The next one is Albert's AP World History review guide.
This is a hundred percent free resource on our blog that will give you helpful pacing
in terms of your study prep and then the last thing is Albert's AP World History course.
This provides hundreds of practice questions with detailed explanations as well as original
FRQ is to stack on top of your AP Central FRQs to give yourself an edge ahead of your
classmates and ahead of your peers so that you can better learn by doing.
If you found this helpful, leave a comment for us telling us what specifically you found
helpful.
We'd love to hear from you and like we mentioned before, be sure to like and subscribe to our
channel for other helpful test taking tips.
And if you haven't already caught our first video on the five steps for writing effective
AP World History FRQs, Be sure to check that out.
Other than that, that's it for this time.
I'll see you next time.