Thursday, April 29, 2010

Description of the AP US History Multiple Choice Exam

Below is the College Board's website description of the multiple choice section of the exam. Perhaps some of you may want to read this and even comment about your experience taking multiple choice tests like the SAT and other APs.

Section I: Multiple-Choice
There are 80 multiple-choice questions on the AP U.S. History Exam. To score a grade of 3 or above, you need to answer about 60 percent of the multiple-choice questions correctly—and write acceptable essays in the free-response section.
Approximately 20 percent of the questions deal with the period through 1789, 45 percent cover 1790 through 1914, and 35 percent cover 1915 to the present including questions on events since 1980.
Within those time periods, 35 percent of the questions are on political institutions, behavior, and public policy; 40 percent are about social and cultural developments; approximately 15 percent of the remaining questions cover diplomacy and international relations; and 10 percent cover economic developments. A substantial number of the social and economic history questions deal with such traditional topics as the impact of legislation on social groups and the economy, or the pressures brought to bear on the political process by social and economic developments. As you've learned, historical inquiry is not neatly divided into categories so many questions pertain to more than one area.
The bulk of the questions focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The questions in the multiple-choice section are designed to test students' factual knowledge, breadth of preparation, and knowledge-based analytical skills.
Students often ask whether they should guess on the multiple-choice questions. Haphazard or random guessing is unlikely to improve scores because one-fourth of a point is subtracted from the score for each incorrect answer. (No points are deducted for a blank answer.) But if you have some knowledge of the question and can eliminate one or more answers, it's usually to your advantage to choose what you believe is the best answer from the remaining choices.

No comments:

Post a Comment