I am taking APUSH this year (sophomore year) and I’ve heard that our APUSH teacher is horrible at teaching. I want to get at least an A- in the class. Are there certain tips to having a good grade in APUSH? Any help would be appreciated.
Adam Norris on Youtube. I don’t take APUSH but he was so helpful to me for other US history classes I’ve taken and I know I’ll use his resources if I do end up taking APUSH. His website is something like apushreview.com, I’m pretty sure. Also you should probably get some kind of review book - maybe look up what the best one is. Good luck!
I’m going to copy & paste this response I wrote from another thread, in case any of it is helpful. I had a 100% in APUSH, 5 on the AP exam & 800 on the SAT II:
If your teacher is not new to teaching the course, then I would have faith that they know how much homework is necessary to get you where you need to be by May. I’m going to assume that the assigned book you’re referencing is an APUSH textbook. I had friends who took regular US History while I took AP, and they often had reading & questions from the textbook, while we just had reading, but there is no question that the AP materials you’ll be working with are much more difficult, detailed, and advanced texts than those you had in earlier history classes. Even if it seems like less reading, and you don’t have formally assigned work, keeping up with the reading is huge. Thirty pages a day doesn’t sound like too much, but if you fall behind because of work from other classes, it can become very overwhelming to catch up.
In terms of studying, Quizlet is very helpful if you have term-based quizzes or tests, but less so for an exam on an entire time period. I used Princeton Review quite heavily, and to study for tests, I would make study guides from the review book and textbook. (When AP time came around, I pretty much just made one big document with all of them in it, which I used to study for both the AP exam and the course final. I then used these same exact materials to study for the subject test.) Even if tests will be markedly more difficult, AP courses are often curved in various ways… my AP World class had a fairly large curve (~50% raw MC = 90%), my AP Calc class used a standard deviation curve, etc. You should be putting in a good amount of work for any AP class, but if your teacher assigns a certain amount of work, then I would rest assured that they know what they’re doing.
Do sophomores usually take APUSH at your school?