Believe it or not, it’s almost May. Don’t panic yet, you still have a little bit of time, but don’t let it creep up on you! The first AP Exam is only 8 weeks away now, and it’s only getting closer. That’s not a lot of time. The longer you wait to start studying, the more hours you have to put in at the end, so start getting ready now! Here’s a few tips to help guide you in the right direction:
Tip #1: Find a resource (or more than one).
There’s still enough time for you to experiment. Find a text you can tolerate or hopefully even enjoy (it could be the textbook, it probably isn’t), and start reading through it. If that’s not working for you, there are plenty of online videos built for students in your position. I know you’ve all heard of Crash Course, but I find it never hurts to remind people that it exists outside the context of clips poorly embedded into teachers’ PowerPoint presentations. Personally, I like Crash Course a lot, but I know some people that really, really don’t. That’s completely fine. Just because a given textbook or video series or teacher doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean you’re inherently bad at the subject. Don’t give up! Just find a source that doesn’t make you want to slam your head into a wall, and work with that. Also, don’t slam your head into a wall.
Tip #2: Take notes.
Once you have your reference material, take notes on it. I have a lot of thoughts about note taking, most of which come from being terrible at note taking for most of high school. I’ll probably do a more in depth post about it at some point in the future. There’s a lot to consider with how you take notes, but I’m going to focus on formatting. There’s a lot of ways to format your notes, and they all have different features and bugs. You can combine aspects of different note taking styles, and make something that works for you!
Most textbooks are structured around an outline format, with big headers, then increasingly tiny headers that get harder and harder to distinguish from paragraph text. If your class is structured around a textbook, then chances are it’s pretty conducive to outline format as well. That doesn’t mean your review has to be in outline format too!
I find that often, for topics like historical events or biological processes where there’s a lot of cause and effect going on, flowcharts work pretty well. If you’re working on AP Lit, and you’re trying to compare three characters from The Great Gatsby, try some kind of graphic organizer. If it helps you conceptualize what you’re learning, keep doing it! There’s no bad ideas when it comes to finding out how you learn best.
Cornell Notes. I can hear the groaning from here. But honestly, Cornell Notes don’t have to be awful. They can be whatever you want them to be. Just leaving a space at the side to mark up later when you’re studying your notes, or when you find something important further on in the textbook that’s relevant to the stuff you did two days ago, makes your final notes neater and more useful. Having a summary at the bottom makes it much easier to search through your notes for information, which you’ll probably want to do later.
Of course, you can and probably should use many techniques in your studying efforts. The more varied and interesting you make your notes, the easier it will be to look back at them. Flipping through 30 pages of outline notes can make your eyes glaze over. That said, make sure the method you’re using makes sense. Trying to figure out later on why you decided to make your notes on crystal lattice structures into a flowchart can make your brain hurt.
Two last pieces of advice on note taking. First, if you have the desire and motivation to do so, color code your notes. This isn’t for everyone and, honestly, I don’t generally do this unless it’s really important, but I find that when I do or if I’m looking at someone else’s color-coded notes, it makes them more visually interesting and makes it easier to find information. Even if there’s no consistent meaning to each color, separating different blocks of information by color often makes it easier to process.
Second, and this is probably the most important advice I’d give, especially when it comes to reviewing for exams, don’t take notes on stuff you already know! You don’t need to go through the entire source material and take notes on everything, just in case there’s one small detail you missed. If you know the kinematic equations like the back of your hand, don’t take notes on the 30 pages of any physics book devoted to the kinematic equations! Your studying time and energy are better devoted to the subjects you don’t understand.
Tip #3: Plan your time.
That leads to the next tip: planning your time. Again, there’s a lot involved here. The biggest thing is to isolate what you need to study. I know this can be hard sometimes, especially when you haven’t gotten to the end of the course yet, but it’s one of the most important parts of studying. Look at the syllabus if it has a course outline, or the table of contents of your textbook. The College Board has course overview documents you can look at for this purpose as well. Find the sections that you don’t know well, and focus on those first. Then, if you still have time and energy, you can work on the stuff you’re more confident in.
The other side of this coin is scheduling. You need to set aside time on a regular basis for studying. Depending on how much you need to study, this might be anywhere from an hour each week to two or three hours a night. Pick a schedule that works for you, and stick with it. If you have trouble with this, it helps to have friends you can study with. Maybe decide that every time you want to study, you’ll meet at the library or a Starbucks, or even one of your houses, and study for your classes. They don’t even need to be in the same class as you; you just need to have the obligation to go and do work, that way you actually do.
Tip #4: Seek Help.
Okay, so you’re meeting up three times a week at the library, watching Crash Course videos and taking beautiful, color-coded Cornell notes with flowcharts and diagrams interspersed with sections of outlines, and you still have no idea how to find the volume of a solid of revolution using the disk method of integration. That’s where tutoring can help. Even in the world of access to all the information you could ever want, there’s nothing quite like having another person show you how to solve a problem, or explain a concept to you. Whether that person is your teacher in a one-on-one meeting, a friend of yours who really knows the material well, or a private tutor like me, you’ll do better with help than without it. If you are looking for a tutor, please get in touch at tutoring@lairdmendelson.com. I look forward to hearing from you!
Good luck on your exams! I hope this article gave you some inspiration for how to prepare, so you won’t be as stressed come May. Please let me know if you’d be interested in reading more articles like this, and if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to hear about.