How Circa Can Help You With Your AP History Test Prep
If you are taking an AP history course this fall, do your studying with the Circa Project! Our experts are both professional historians and award-winning teachers. Their courses can help you prepare at all stages of your studies.
The AP history exams are especially difficult. Maybe this makes sense: they are supposed to take the place of up to a year of college instruction. At the same time, these exams cover an enormous amount of material and also require that students demonstrate a wide-reaching skill set. The Circa Project has many courses that can help students prepare for their AP exams in a variety of ways. Choose the programs or courses that you need most to help you meet your goals.
AP Exam Skills
Most exams test knowledge, as opposed to skills. The AP history exams, however, test your abilities to perform the skills of the discipline of history, in addition to your knowledge about the past. This test structure makes sense: the AP exam takes the place of a college course, and in a college history course, you would be expected to demonstrate that you had learned the skills of history, in addition to the information covered on whatever topic the course was on.
Circa’s skill-driven programs teach students these same skills that they will need on the AP history exams. We have courses on analyzing sources, making an argument, and writing effectively. For instance, the political cartoon above is pretty typical of the visual sources you can expect to encounter on the AP history exams. If you encountered an image like this one on the test, where would you start to break down what you are seeing? Once you knew what you were looking at, what would you say was the cartoonist’s point? And finally, how would you place this cartoon into its wider historical context? These are the kinds of skills that Circa expert historians teach students in our Visual Analysis course.
You can design a skill-drive program to target all of the skills you need for the AP history exams, or you can take a course to work specifically on one skill that you want to improve on.
AP History Writing
60% of the exam score is based on written responses. These written responses are especially tricky because there are three different types: short answer essays, long answer essays, and the document based question.
Writing effectively—especially in such a limited amount of time—can be hard. It can also be difficult to master the underlying skills needed to write an effective essay. For instance, the core of any successful essay is a sophisticated and compelling argument. But what are the criteria for writing a successful argument?
Circa’s AP History Writing course teaches students the skills that they need to successfully write history essays. And it teaches students the different expectations for all three AP history essays.
While students might encounter some of this material in their AP courses, Circa courses offer an additional opportunity to practice and especially to get feedback on writing. Feedback and rewriting is crucial to improvement. Circa historians add comments to first drafts of practice essays so that students can see how to concretely improve their writing. Students then get the change to put these suggestions into practice by writing second drafts of their essay responses.
AP History Content
Finally, Circa experts are here to help students with history content. We clear up confusions about the past, whether it is on just one event or the entire course content. We help student see the bigger issues that overarch the course. And we especially help students with content from the final decades covered on the exam. Many classrooms do not make it to the end of the course, so Circa offers a course on the History of the Twentieth Century, which introduces the most important events and people from the final century. This course is especially useful since most students have never learned about the twentieth century, even before they enrolled in the AP course. This means students have little previous fallback knowledge to use on the exam. With Circa’s course, students can feel confident about working with questions on the 20th century.
More Information
If you are interested in becoming a Circa student, apply today! We accept applications on a rolling basis. In addition to our courses, Circa’s history experts regularly post updates to help all students studying for the AP. Check out this blog for tips on keeping a schedule, studying regularly for the test, working with primary sources, and much more!
Circa experts work directly with AP students
Whether you want a quick review before the test or a comprehensive program leading up to the exam, Circa’s award-winning educators are here to help you improve your skills and meet your goals.