Not sure what the first steps to take are when it comes to
tackling your AP Euro FRQs?
Then stay tuned.
Because in this video, we're going to go over 11 tips to help you score that
four or five on your AP Euro exam by tackling the free response section.
Before we get started, this video is brought to you by Albert.
If you haven't already created your free account, you can do so by using
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With it, you'll be able to start your AP Euro exam prep to
help you get that four or five.
Without further ado, let's jump into these tips.
Tip one when it comes to tackling your AP Euro FRQs is to turn
the prompt into a question.
One of the worst mistakes that you can make taking the AP Euro exam is to answer
the wrong question in your FRQ responses.
So, a good trick here is to think about how you can reposition the prompt
that's given to you as a question.
Let's take a look at an example from the 2019 AP Euro exam.
The question asked us to evaluate whether or not the Catholic Church in the 1600s
was opposed to new ideas in science.
Rewriting this prompt as a question, we might ask, "In the 1600s was the Catholic
Church opposed new ideas in science.
If so, how strong was the opposition?"
By rewording our prompts into questions we can start to think
about what is the actual thing being asked of us on the exam.
Tip number two, when it comes to tackling your AP Euro FRQs
is to write your thesis twice.
Once in the beginning and then once in the end.
You don't have to necessarily use the same exact words, but this test hack will
actually give you a higher probability of scoring points for your thesis.
In fact, in the 2019 Chief Reader Reports, the graders noted how some students had
more specific thesis in their conclusions as opposed to in their introductions.
In other words, it wasn't until the student had written the entire essay
and wrapped it up in terms of their thesis statement in the conclusion
that they earn their thesis point.
Why do you think that is?
Well, our take on it is that as a student works their way through their essay
and adds in more and more supporting evidence, they get more confident
in exactly what they're arguing.
So by the end of their essay, when they re summarize their thesis, it becomes
a very strong and coherent argument.
Something to remember here, as you write your thesis, both in the introduction,
as well as the conclusion is to make sure that you're being specific.
Both the 2018 and the 2019 Chief Reader Reports noted how students
often lacked a line of reasoning in their actual thesis statement.
For example, making a statement like, "Some wondered if the Catholic Church was
actually opposed to scientific advancement in the 1600s while others disagreed."
is not a thesis statement.
The key thing to remember here is that you need to take a side and you
need to back it up with evidence.
Tip number three, when it comes to tackling your AP Euro FRQs is to know
the rubric like the back of your hand.
If you don't understand all the key ways that the graders are going to be
grading your essay, it's going to be difficult for you to score full points.
The AP Euro exam is one of the toughest exams to score well on your FRQs and DBQs.
In fact, in 2019, the mean score for the DBQ was 3.26 points out of seven.
That's not even half the possible points.
The two areas that students miss the most points on are typically in the sourcing
and the complexity section of the rubric.
It's very important that you answer all aspects of the question, include a
clear thesis statement, use documents and bring in different points of view.
If you're looking for a helpful readable version of the rubric,
we have a link to a resource in the accompanying blog articles.
So check that out in the video description below.
Before we head into tip number four here, if you're finding this video helpful,
do us a favor and smash that like button below and also consider subscribing
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The fourth tip for you is to make sure that you're reading the entire document.
Students are often rushing to write a response to the prompt that
they don't actually fully analyze every aspect of every document.
In the 2019 exam, the Chief Reader noted how students occasionally skimmed over
the actual point of a document in which they summarize something correctly from
the earlier part of the document, but they completely missed the latter half
of the document, which contradicted the information from earlier in the document.
So it's really important that you take a step back and you pace yourself and
making sure that you truly understand every single document in there entirety.
A helpful tip for you to do here is to read through every single document
and make sure that you have a clear one to two sentence summary as to
what the document is about before moving on to the next document.
The fifth tip for you is to assess the author's perspective.
It's really important that you think about why the author may have written this piece
and why they might have that particular perspective that they're presenting.
And then from there, it's important for you to think about, why is
this document specifically from this author being given to me as
something to evaluate when answering the prompt what's being asked of me.
Understanding how supporting and contrasting viewpoints in response to a
particular event in history is a critical historical skill that is going to be
assessed of you on your AP Euro exam.
Tip six is to make sure that you are grouping your documents.
It's really important that you group your documents and to at least three
groups to give yourself the best shot of scoring full points here.
As you work your way through the documents, think about the
potential groups that different documents can fall into.
Pretty much, every single document that the College Board ever gives you
can fall into one of these buckets.
Politics, economics, imperialism, nationalism, humanitarianisms, religion,
society and culture, intellectual development and advancement.
Our next tip is to make sure that you are planning out your writing.
One of the worst things you can do when it comes to the FRQ section of AP
Euro is to simply start jotting things down and responding to the question.
Take a step back and plan out how you're going to respond to the prompt.
Ultimately, taking this time to plan out your essay will help with
the overall flow of your essay to make it a more coherent argument.
We recommend that you focus first on your grouping.
Once you have your three groups in mind, think about how you're
going to incorporate them into your thesis statement.
When you focus first on your grouping, you'll naturally know where to use
certain documents throughout your essay.
So this will help you in making your essay much more coherent
over the course of your writing.
What's also nice about this sort of brainstorming approach is that your
thesis ultimately becomes your brainstorm.
And from there, your groupings become your main body paragraphs.
It's a really easy way for you to have a recipe for success when it comes to
your AP Euro free response questions.
If you're looking for a more detailed example of this, check out the
accompanying blog article in the link in the video description below.
We take an example from Tom Richey and break down specifically why
he was able to set himself up for success based on his planning period.
Tip eight is to make sure that you're actually using the contents of the
document in your response to the question.
This may seem super obvious, but sometimes students will spend their entire essay
summarizing things of what happened in the document, but not connected back to their
thesis statement or the perspective that they're trying to argue with their reader.
There is a big difference between summarizing and analyzing.
Summarizing is simply giving the high level overview of what's going on in the
document whereas analyzing is connecting it back to that thesis statement.
As you work your way through your documents, you want to ask
yourself this question frequently.
Am I just summarizing or am I analyzing?
If I'm analyzing, then I'm responding to the initial question and I'm explaining
the relevance of the document to that particular perspective that I have.
Our ninth tip is to make sure that you are connecting between documents.
We recommend that as you plan out your essay, you think about at least two
different opportunities for you to connect different documents with one another.
Here's an example of how you might do this.
You might make a statement along the lines of, "The fact that X person believes that
XYZ is the root of ABC, is due to the fact that he is Y" In this example, we might
pull X person from document one whereas why reason as to why he might think
this way may come from document four.
This is one of the best ways that you can demonstrate your analytical
abilities for your AP grader to help you score full points.
Tip number 10 is to make sure that you are not blowing off the DBQ.
Ultimately, the document based question is 25% of your score whereas the long
essay question is only 15% of your score.
So it makes sense for you to make sure that you feel super confident
when it comes to approaching your document based question.
Even if you feel stressed about the multiple choice sections or the short
answer questions, we've seen students be able to salvage their AP Euro score
simply because they rocked their DBQ.
Tip 11 when it comes to tackling your AP Euro FRQs is to read through
past strong responses of FRQs.
The College Board does us a favor and providing a ton of exemplary
responses from students that scored really well on their DBQs.
So, what we recommend you do is to read through the student responses and then try
to think about how they would have scored based on the rubric, and then compare
how you graded the student with how the grater actually graded the student.
You should be able to dissect specifically what the student did
well and what they didn't do well, how they earn certain points and how
they may have missed other points.
These past responses are accessible for everyone and so it's really important for
you to go through at least three years of FRQs to truly understand the sorts of ways
that students respond to these questions.
There you have it.
11 tips to help you on your AP European History free response section.
If you're looking for even more tips, including some tips by AP Euro teachers,
be sure to check out the blog article in the link in the video description below.
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