<p>I was contemplating this thought the other day...to what extent can/have you BSed AP essays? For example, if a USH prompt asks you to describe the women's movement of the mid 19th century, could you just make up names (e.g. Jane Doe)? I know it sounds crazy, but our teacher was said it would sound 'smarter' if you used some of the less well-known advocates (such as Alice Paul) as compared to some of the well-known advocates (such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton). Upon hearing that, I had the aforementioned epiphany...just make up names if you can't think of any real people. There is no possible way for the AP graders to know absolutely every person in history, so if you are a decent writer and have a bit of imagination, you could make up names and stories to accompany them. Also, because the readers are under a stringent time constraint, I seriously doubt they would attempt to look up the names that you made up to verify your claim. They must take what you write at face value and accept the fact that they just don't know enough history to know who you're talking about :)</p>
<p>Comments.</p>
<p>Haha I did that for the SAT essay when I was using historical examples and I forgot what some of the terms/events were called. </p>
<p>Didn’t do that for the APUSH exam though haha, I figured that they’re pretty smart and can tell if you don’t know what you’re talking about. However, I DID BS quite a bit on those essays. They’re hard! If you don’t know anything about the topic, it’s hard to make up stuff and write about it. I mean, for the DBQ, you have some documents to guide you along but for those essays, you just have to know them. I just made up some stuff for mine…related it to something that sounded familiar. hahah. I doubt I got like any points for those…probably why I got a 4.</p>
<p>I bet it’s a lot easier to BS stuff for other AP exams though. I plan on doing that a lot for my Human Geography one because most of the terms are pretty self explanatory so even if I don’t know it, I can probably make up a bunch of stuff about it.</p>
<p>English is pretty easy to BS too. As long as you make your point and support it.</p>
<p>I refuse to study for English Lang due to time.</p>
<p>I’m confident the BSing will suffice.</p>
<p>Actually, don’t they use a rubric for scoring with basically a list of topics that they give you points for, and if your person isn’t on the rubric, then you won’t get credit for it? The idea being that if you know the very obscure workers in the movement/era, then you must know the prominent ones.</p>
<p>Yeah, for history they have a pretty strict rubric and you have to mention certain things. For English, you can totally get away with BSing.</p>
<p>It seems like USH is one of the hardest AP exams to BS for. If you think about it, students tend to learn (and remember better) the big name people of history such as Andrew Jackson as oppose to Andrew Johnson of the antebellum period. Rarely do such lesser known names even appear in just a high school course. So whereas BSing could work in other exams, the USH exam is much different.</p>
<p>my biggest fear is being presented with an essay topic i know nothing about. i would literally not be able to write a thing…:/</p>
<p>I really wouldn’t BS it for APUSH. A lot of the graders know the subject matter pretty well. But I plan on BSing statistics for English :p</p>
<p>@smarteeangel101–at that point, just pray nobody else knows it either hahaha. THat’s what I kept on thinking about. I had nooo idea about one of the essay topics and I just started blabbing things using some words in the question. I had no clue what it was talking about…I had never heard of it before.</p>