Hello, everyone!
I’m currently taking A.P United States History in my sophomore year. This was the first time I’ve actually ever taken an AP history course(my school didn’t offer APs to freshmen) and I’m having A LOT of trouble with the MCQs. I’m doing just fine with the other aspects of the class, such as short answer questions. I’ve also had no problem with the actual content itself; knowing the specific “themes”/patterns, the events, the people, etc.
As many of you guys already know, the typical APUSH MCQ usually introduces the question/s with a stimulus. It then proceeds to ask a few questions based on the stimulus. The tricky part for me is the answers, which I find really unclear/ambiguous. Occasionally, I find that two of the four answers can be immediately crossed out, but the final two both hold truths in someway or another. I have a really hard time distinguishing them.
It’s the start of the school year, and we just had the first big test(on periods 1-2). The score I got back wasn’t really what I was happy with. Looking back to in my grade book, I see that I’ve also gotten really low scores on the MCQ quizzes too.
I want to be able to change that. How did you guys approach MCQs in APUSH? Any tips? Should I start doing “practice MCQs” on that specific period? Is this something I will get better at as I do more MCQs?
Note: I know that in the past three years, roughly 55% of the students taught by my current APUSH teacher have gotten 5s on the exam, which I believe is well above national average. Looking at my AMSCO book, which I already bought, the practice MCQs themselves aren’t as hard as they are in my class. Could it be that my teacher is writing harder tests so that we can be more prepared for the exam itself? Again, there have been people scoring As on these MCQs, so I’m not really sure that’s the case.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!