Let me preface this post by saying, yes, I know this is a very subjective topic.
I would just like to get a general idea of which courses/tests are generally more difficult.
APUSH
AP US Gov
AP Psychology
AP World History
AP European History (I’ve already taken it.)
Personally, this is how I rank them:
Never taken or plan to take European History, so unfortunately I can’t compare it. World History in my opinion is the hardest because of all the content needed to the know and the knowledge-based questions asked in the Multiple Choice. I also hated the CCOT and Compare/Contrast essays. However, you should know that World History is undergoing a redesign starting this year where it is becoming more like US History. Adam Norris made US History very feasible for me.
I would also rank US History and World History to be the harder ones of all the social studies/social science APs, just because there is such an insane amount of information you are required to know and analyze. World History had a pretty low amount of 5s this year, too.
I’ve only taken APUSH, AP Psych and AP World:
From hardest to easiest:
AP World is more broad in scope than APUSH, and there’s just so much you need to know that’s not necessarily interrelated with each other. In APUSH, each war/battle/etc is tied to the previous one, so there’s a sort of flow that helps you understand the subject.
For Psych, I’m pretty sure they recycle old AP questions. I studied past APs and atleast 20 of the same questions I saw were on the exam I took. If you memorize terms you’re fine.