Our Favorite AP Exam Study Tools
- Planning Goose Staff
- 18 hours ago
- 3 min read
Like it or not, it's AP Exam season! Which, of course, means that it's time to start studying. And, while it might not be true for every test, AP Exams do have a right and wrong way to study, and we'll give you a few ways to do just that. In an Internet full of study tools, we've created a list of some of our favorites, so let's get started.
Over the last few years, Knowt has turned into another flashcard maker to a complete study machine. For nearly every AP class, the website has free multiple choice, free response, and general practice, in addition to study guides and review documents. It's perfect for actually applying the material you learned all year, especially with exam specific questions.
College Board - The CED
While we love Knowt, all roads lead back to the College Board. And, your starting point for review should be your Course & Exam Description, or more commonly known as the CED. This massive packet has exactly what standards and content you need to know, broken down by lesson, and includes other rubrics and scoring information you should feel comfortable with. To find your class's, just search "[class name] CED" in a search engine, and it'll be the first result.
College Board - Past FRQs
For any AP class with a writing component (which is pretty much all of them), you should be practicing your free response questions with College Board's FRQ bank. While they changed it to only include the past 3 years' FRQs a little bit ago, 3 years of practice is still better than none. The bank includes the blank FRQs as they were seen on the exam, the scoring distribution from that exam, the answers, rubrics, and even sample student responses. This bank is your most reliable source for exam-like practice, so when working on SAQs, LEQs, or DBQs, use this. Like before, you can just search "[class name] past FRQs" in a search engine and click on the first link.
Heimler is pretty much the best AP History review tool, so much so that it's pretty surprising if you don't already know him. He has lesson-by-lesson videos for AP World, AP Human Geo, APUSH, and AP Gov, plus review packets, essay outlining tools, and a whole other plethora of exam studying resources. Whether you choose to take notes on each video or just want to watch it in the background, we definitely recommend adding Heimler into your AP History studying.
If you've taken a test with College Board in the last 3 years, you've definitely used Bluebook. But, it's not just for you to take the PSAT, SAT, or ACT on the day of the test. If you open the Bluebook app and sign in with your College Board account, you'll be able to practice any time. If you click on "Full Length Practice," you can take a (big surprise) full length practice exam, made by College Board. But, if Bluebook isn't working for you, then log into AP Classroom and ask your teacher to post a practice exam--it'll follow the same idea.
We just launched our AP Exam Cram page on our website, and we'd be lying if we said it was anything less than a great study tool. We have a collection of all of our Blog posts about studying, various AP Exam study guides we've made, and an AP Exam Study Planner template for you to plan out your studying. And, like everything else, all of our resources are free, so go try them out!
Hopefully this list will help your AP Exam studying, even just a little. Remember, there's only 3 weeks until exams start, so now is a perfect time to get studying. And, if you liked this, check out our other posts below or in the Blog page.
