As we near the second week of AP exams, I just wanted to give some advice to how to approach the second week of exams.

It’s near impossible to learn the necessary content for exams in just a weeks time. A bit of reviewing and brushing up on vocab or key ideas would be sufficient enough to retain the knowledge you currently have. The days before an exam would be better spent testing. In most AP classes, there is not sufficient AP practice. You may know the material well but learning how the AP exam graders examine your answers can help you gain a significant amount points. Doing practice free-response questions is a helpful way to improve your success on the AP exam. If you don’t know, on basically all AP exams, there are lots of past free-response questions from the past official AP exams. They also have scoring guidelines, sample responses, and scoring distributions usually on the website as well. Self grade some questions and see how you do. You often know the content but just do not have the right mindset in how to answer the questions how AP exam graders want it to be graded.

Finally, get some sleep the night before an AP exam. No matter how much you study, if you’re sleepy during the exam, you’ll do a lot worse than you would expect. You’ve worked so far to get to this point. Finish strong!