<p>Ok, my teacher did not teach us how to do the standard essays and DBQs at all. We never got any practice and will never get any practice because she has 72 students and does not have the time to go through to read everyone's essay. Do you guys have any guides, tips, suggestions, or instructions on how to approach the DBQ and standard essays? Any helpful websites, hints, personal experience, study guides? Anything at all? Thanks!</p>
<p>read a prep book and grab a released test.</p>
<p>Go to apcentral.collegeboard.com</p>
<p>Mouse over AP Courses and Exams and click Courses Home Page</p>
<p>Go to US History (obviously)</p>
<p>Under Exam Information and Resources click on AP US History Exam Information</p>
<p>… and you’ve got yourself some free response questions!</p>
<p>hope it helps</p>
<p>I know about the released free response questions already. I just need a guide of some sort with instructions and tips on how to approach the questions.</p>
<p>Use Practice books and older copies.</p>
<p>It’s good to practice with released questions. When writing a dbq try to use most of the sources. Do not quote them, but put the letter next to the reference. This may seem obvious, but in your thesis you want to highlight a cause effect relationship. For example, I wrote a paper in class on how legislation and court decisions affected civil rights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (this was a free response question on a past AP test). My thesis was the that although Plessy v Ferguson and Mississippi v Williams did not cause Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement, they officially validated these laws and allowed the separate but equal system to persist without opposition until Brown (and it took a while for that to take effect). Do not list evidence in your thesis, but unify it. When the questions asks “to what extent” state the effect of the subject, and then justify why this is so.</p>
<p>I agree with the advice on reading a prep book, since they seem to provide suggestions on how to wrote (such as Princeton Review). Your teacher, though, is not preparing you for the AP exam to the fullest extent.</p>
<p>above all, just write what you know. you don’t have to be a great writer, but you do have to show that you know a lot. true story: around semester exam time we took an actual released timed essay, and then our teacher pulled out copies of actual essays from students who took the apush exam that year and we played a “guess the grade” sort of game, warning us beforehand that one of the papers was a 3 and one was a 9.
- it was easy to spot the 3 - too short, very vague, badly written, factual errors, etc.
- one of them was of decent length and decently organized but horribly written, with almost irrelevant info tacked onto loosely related sentences. even though there was so much good info we thought the paper deserved around a 6 because it was so badly written.<br>
- and then there was one more paper that was fairly decent, with lots of good info, but was very well written, and we thought that was the one that deserved the 9.
and guess what? on the last two, we were wrong. the horribly written paper with lots of facts got the 9. the well written paper, on the other hand, got a 7. guess why? the facts. that’s what matters most.</p>