AP US History DBQ topics?

<p>^^me too..and the free responses. I don't see why we can't discuss the MC at all though, is the college board going to reuse the questions or what?</p>

<p>It's called equating. They reuse questions from last year to figure out how competent this year's class is to last year's.</p>

<p>For example</p>

<p>This year's class earns an average score of 60.7 points, normally distributed, with a standard deviation of 2.7</p>

<p>Last year's class earns an average score of 65.4 with a Standard deviation of 3.4.</p>

<p>We have two possibilities:
A. Last year's class was smarter.
B. This year's exam was harder.</p>

<p>In statistics, this is called a confounding variable; We cannot tell in this situation whether hypothesis A, hypothesis B, or a combination of both is true. (Science-lovers, this is why you only manipulate one independent variable!)</p>

<p>To solve this problem they reuse some of the multiple choice questions from the past exam. They compare the scores of this year's students with the scores of last year's students.</p>

<p>Continuing the previous example:</p>

<p>This year's class earns an average score of 12.4 on the 20 common multiple choice, with a standard deviation of .8</p>

<p>Last year's class earns an average score of 11.8 on the 20 common multiple choice with a standard deviation of 1.3</p>

<p>Last year's students did score higher. However, on the common questions, they did not. In this example, we can see that hypothesis B is correct (this year's test was harder). Having a set of common multiple choice questions allows the college board to differentiate between the varying difficulty of the test and the varying ability level of the test-takers in different years.</p>

<p>I should have read this before the test and I might not have been so thrown by that time period.</p>

<p>I went into it having no idea whatsoever. That's by far the best approach.</p>

<p>Hey Jbruner so only 20 mc questions from last year are repeated. So next year APUSH wont have the "exact same" MC but some of the same and the rest the collegeboard will write new questions?</p>

<p>Correct. I think the number is about 20. Remember, the exam has to have questions in common with last year's exam and different ones in common with next years exam so they can eventually release the older ones.</p>

<p>hey i have a question: what if my last essay was 1.75 pages and towards the end my handwriting got huge and almost illegible....
but you can still see words like fed govt. and stuff
could i possibly get a 6? no right... well i chose TR for that, and i had info, just not enough time!!</p>