Hey!
So this year I am taking AP Macroecon. during the school year and am planning on taking the AP exam for it as well. I also was looking to take the AP Micro exam even though my school doesn’t offer the class. Is there anyone who has done something similar and can share their experience with self-studying and maybe offer some advice in terms of prep books or study plans they used? Thanks!
Yeah I’m doing the same thing and I’ve been listening to some microeconomics lectures on YouTube from various universities and am considering getting a book from The Princeton Review to self-study the Micro part. Also thinking about self studying comparative government because our school only offers US gov.
Is the class a year-long class? Just a little rant here, at most universities, Intro Macro/Micro combined is covered as either a one semester class, or as separate 2 quarters of classes. So in a “bang for the buck” sense it’s pretty bad, you’re taking a one year class to get credit for a one quarter class. Then again, the same is true of other classes like Stats and Psych, though they are more or less one semester classes and not one quarter.
Anyhow enough with the rant. My kid decided to sign up for and self study both Micro and Macro, even though he was only taking a one semester Honors Econ class, and not an AP course. For Macro he spent a total of like only 10 extra hours studying for the test, for Micro maybe 20 extra hours total on his own. Got only 3s on both tests, but since he was in 12th grade, he didn’t care at all as he was already accepted into his school. And got credits for the courses (needed 3s), even though he can’t skip the intro class in college (he needed 4s in order to do it). So with more studying, you can easily do it on your own and get a good score.
Note that colleges may have policies of removing AP credit if the student takes the course covering the same material (e.g. taking introductory economics after getting credit for AP economics).
Yeah if my kid wanted to take advanced Econ classes in the future, he would unfortunately be forced to take the Intro class first, which would eliminate the AP credits.
I took AP Macro as a class, but self studied micro because I could not fit it in to my schedule. The text was the same, so I skimmed the relevant chapters in the text, used Princeton Review, reverting back to the text for any concepts that were unclear.