3. Offer supplementary materials.

When I was a full-time teacher, I used a variety of resources to support students throughout the year and in their preparation for the end-of-year exam. AP students are often highly motivated and will go the extra mile to study or to participate in projects, but it’s critical to provide them with the materials they need to help direct those studies and increase their odds of success in class and on their AP exams. This means offering more than just practice questions: immediate, explanatory feedback helps students learn as they practice and retain what they have learned.

4. Gear your lessons to the grade level of your students. 

AP students are, as a whole, intelligent, and driven students. However, that does not necessarily mean that they will come into your class with all the skills they need in order to excel. For example, the AP Human Geography exam is a freshman-level test. These kids have never taken an Advanced Placement class before. When you give them practice tests, you may need to work through those tests with them to explain why a given answer is wrong and what they need to do in order to arrive at the correct answer.

5. Give full practice tests.

Give students opportunities to take practice exams as much as your schedule allows. As a teacher, I didn’t have enough time to give the whole test in class, so I would do the multiple choice one day, then do the essays another. I did, however, offer students the chance to take the full test after school so that they could have the whole experience. 

6. Warn students against overstudying.

It doesn’t take long for students to burn out if they stay up too late or go over the same material too many times. Instead, provide students with guidelines to help them study without cramming. Encourage them to get plenty of rest in the days leading up to the test to help maximize their results. 

7. Make it fun when you can.

Just like any other class, AP students need to have fun—and they’re more likely to remember fun lessons. For some AP document-based questions, you have to take the documents and compare them. To prepare students for this, I would do a “bucketing exercise” where students would take similar documents and put them in buckets—but instead of doing the documents first, I would start with candy. They had different kinds of candy and they had to say, “These are chocolate, these are fruit,” and put them in the right bucket. Then I had the students look at the candy from a different angle. “This group all have red wrappers,” or “This group all have nuggets.” This forces them to think past the obvious. As a reward, they got to take the candy home.

Finally, if you’re a new teacher or teaching a subject for the first time, my biggest piece of advice is to ask for help. You can find help from other educators online or in your building—everybody remembers that first class. There might be days when you question your sanity, but in the end it’s all worth it when you see your kids learning and believing in themselves.