United States History: Preparing for the Advanced Placement Examination

“Read it, and get a 5-you will, take my word for it.” Read more…

“This book is incredible. It’s disappointing that this book is hard to find and buy because it’s so much better than the other review books. A lot of people say REA is the best, but that’s just because they haven’t seen this one.

First of all, this book is organized incredibly well. Everything flowed into the next section nicely, but you could also skip around easily if you had weaker areas that you needed to review before the test.” Read more…

“This semester I got this book and I always got easy As on my tests. This book summarizes the main ideas of each chapters without eliminating anything important ideas so you will always be very prepared if you read through this book.” Read more…

“In my AP class, we have the ungodly task of reading the Enduring Visions text book. That book was unclear in places and droned on and on, much like a boring lecture- scratch that, a VERY boring lecture. Chapters were 30+ pages and our typical weekly assignment was to write a complex sentence summarizing the main points of each subheading. You can imagine how tedious that is. The first week, it was 25 subheadings, trying to sort out which info we NEED and which info is pointless.

Our teacher, however, gave us an alternative- go out and buy or barrow a copy of this book. This book, she said, followed our text book exactly, only it cut out the useless information, making reading clearer and a lot shorter. To give you an idea of how short, chapter 5 in our text book was 30 pages, 25 subheadings. The same chapter in this book was a mere 10 or 11 pages with 8 subheadings.” Read more…

AP Exam

Each AP course has a corresponding exam that participating schools worldwide
administer in May. Except for AP Studio Art, which is a portfolio assessment, each AP
Exam contains a free-response section (essays, problem solving, oral responses, etc.)
as well as multiple-choice questions.

Written by a committee of college and university faculty and experienced AP
teachers, the AP Exam is the culmination of the AP course and provides students with
the opportunity to earn credit and/or placement in college. Exams are scored by
college professors and experienced AP teachers using scoring standards developed by
the committee.

AP Exam Grades
The Readers’ scores on the free-response questions are combined with the results of
the computer-scored multiple-choice questions; the weighted raw scores are summed
to give a composite score. The composite score is then converted to a grade on AP’s
5-point scale:

AP GRADE QUALIFICATION
5 Extremely well qualifi ed
4 Well qualifi ed
3 Qualifi ed
2 Possibly qualifi ed
1 No recommendation

AP Exam grades of 5 are equivalent to A grades in the corresponding college course.
AP Exam grades of 4 are equivalent to grades of A–, B+, and B in college. AP Exam
grades of 3 are equivalent to grades of B–, C+, and C in college.

Source: http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/ap-biology-course-description.pdf

AP Exam