I’m currently a junior in high school and this year I will be taking my first AP exam for APUSH. With that being said, I was just wondering if anyone had any tips or tricks on how to take notes or study for quizzes and exams efficiently? For our class, the teacher is making us outline each chapter and it’s not helping that I always tend to think everything presented in a section of the textbook is important information to write down. Any advice for overcoming this?
YouTube videos are a good way to study. Tom Richey and Adam Norris both have good channels. Search/ask on the AP threads for more information.
Take very good notes in class- you can always condense/edit later.
Read the textbook carefully, but before you write something down, think of whether it is important. For APUSH it is better to think of big concepts rather than minutiae.
the AMSCO book for APUSH was my go to. I skimmed most of the book and had a horrible teacher but was still able to get a 4. Know the big ideas but have a decent understanding of some of the small things.
My kid would tell you to set a number of lines in your outline for each section or paragraph and stick to it. It’s the process of deciding what’s most significant about what you are reading that’s helpful to learning. You aren’t just supposed to copy down the textbook and the finished product of the outline doesn’t really matter.