<p>I took it last year…Wasnt bad… I bought the Barron’s Review book 2 weeks before the test. Only studied on my way to school on the bus. Finished 1/3 of the book. I’ve gotten a 4 on the test. teacher stunk. All he did was show us movies before the test -.-…Then again, I remembered the stuff I’ve learned in 8th and 9th grade, so yea</p>
<p>To be honest, World History is the only AP test that I haven’t studied for. However, I did manage to get myself a 5 :)</p>
<p>I made a 5 by obsessively re-reading the content section of PR maybe 4 or 5 times, and that’s about it. =P It was my first AP exam, so I started reviewing in February (don’t ask), with about 4 hours of prep every week until 1 week before the exam, at which point I spent 2 hours nightly. Over all, I was extremely over-prepared. The real AP exam is on par, difficulty-wise, with PR questions.</p>
<p>So… here’s my story:</p>
<p>I stayed home from school today to read Barron’s and study. I was really good about studying for Bio and I read for several hours straight on Saturday and Sunday… but I haven’t even made it a fifth of the way through Barron’s. I hate history, and it just doesn’t seem like studying for this exam will help, because it’s so in-depth and detailed. If it were purely factual and memorization, It would be easy, but such is not the case.</p>
<p>I hope the boatload of homework and assignments my teacher gave throughout the year (literally, we’ve had hundreds of assignments in just ~150 days of school) will come into play tomorrow. I’m hoping for a miracle.</p>
<p>I’ll just read my cram packet and call it a night. :o</p>
<p>Ah I’m so nervous about this one for some reason. My first AP exam was the Music Theory one on monday, and it turned out to be really hard, especially the dictation. I have the PR for APWH so i’m gonna do the practice tests in a bit, but all the teachers keep saying that the PR practice exams are a lot harder than the actual MC on the AP test. Can anyone confirm this?</p>
<p>Also, any suggestions on how to BS an essay well in case they give me a topic that I have no idea about? haha</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>BS tips: A lot of things will come back to one (or more) of three things: Politics, economics, and culture. ALWAYS include those in your essays.
Motives for a lot of actions (including some explorations) are usually either God (desire to spread religion), Gold (wealth), and Glory (credit and praise (plus power) for conquering or discovering something).</p>
<p>And lastly, In the words of my APWH teacher: “When in doubt, answer with ‘trade’”. :p</p>
<p>On BSing essays: On account of the way your brain stores information, I’d advise that you just start writing down what little you know about the question. If what little you know doesn’t apply to the essay, then just do it in the little space provided. You’ll probably think of something related. If not, then just make ish up. On a particularly difficult physics problem on Monday, I just wrote poetry.</p>
<p>And yes, I did take AP Psych. Self studied. And I, capacitor-like, have dumped 90% of the info since then.</p>
<p>I took it last year. A test on the entire history of the world sounds pretty intimidating, but it’s actually not that bad. My class actually did nothing (but had insanely difficult tests?). I just read and took notes on PR a few weeks before the test and I got a five. I was really worried about the essays because I had never written anything like that but they weren’t bad, like Millancad said, you’ll probably be able to come up with something to say about them. Religion is always a good fall back too.</p>
<p>And yeahh, I thought the actual test was much easier than the PR practice tests…</p>
<p>^^^Thanks! Those are very useful, especially since I’m so worried we’re going to get something that I know nothing about 
But I’m going to go through cram packets when I’m done going over this migration stuff my teacher sent us, study more time lines, and skim through the info in the 5 steps to a 5 book. Hopefully I’ll do well. I know generally what I need to focus on so yeah…</p>
<p>But if the FRQs are about religion or WWII, I’m set :P</p>
<p>Tips from my ap world history teacher:
studying: focus on trade and how civilizations interacted with each other
essays:ANALYZE, don’t just spit out information, especially for the dbq</p>
<p>All I did was read the princeton review and I got a five (however history is my best subject and my teacher was amazing so you might want to study more than that)</p>
<p>i didnt read the book. barely studied. i paid attention in class. the test was easy (i took last years) and i got a 5</p>
<p>I speed read through the entire PR. I didn’t think the test was that difficult. I might’ve omitted anywhere from 3-6 MC, but I think I nailed all the essays (this was the 2008 exam). We were all kind of annoyed that we barely had any choices of regions for the change over time and comparative though</p>
<p>Okay, so since, as, I think, aforementioned, my teacher sucks and I know nothing, I’m officially going to get off the computer to go study. If you see me around here, insult me, and then I might leave. :D</p>
<p>In terms of advice for the essay portions, which book is better (Kaplan, Princeton, Barron)?</p>
<p>Honestly, I didn’t use a review book to teach me how to write the essays (was fortunate to actually have a teacher that drilled the essays into our heads), but I found PR great for the info it had. In order to write effectively, you need to at least have some info about the topic first. at least, that’s how I thought</p>
<p>Thanks guys for all the helpful input. I’m about to take Practice Test #1 in the PR so let’s see how this goes! I think I should probably review more on the Cold War… my teacher didn’t really go into it at all, but idk if it will be on the test or not.</p>
<p>My teacher said that since the U.S. is often “put aside” in the APWH curriculum and often the exam, they may surprise us with a US-based essay question. I sure hope they ask about the Cold War or the World Wars because I know those like the back of my hand! :p</p>
<p>Two words: Cultural Diffusion. Include this somehow in your FRQs, especially if they concern trade/interaction/well pretty much any topic.</p>
<p>^^That would be the greatest thing that could happen tomorrow. I would so love it if it were on WWII or the Cold War.</p>
<p>^Sometimes the essays are on well known parts of history like WWII and the Cold War and other times its on really obscure things like the Indian Ocean…YIKES!!</p>