Preparation Tip for the AP Exam

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Checking out the official site of the Euro exam is your first order of business. It provides both a thorough description of the exam, content and scoring, and a collection of past exams (not the multiple choice sections, however).

IMPORTANT INSIGHT: most of the scoring on the exam concerns your writing. You will write a DBQ of course, but also two substantive, free-form essays. These three essays must be nailed — with thesis, clear argument, and substantial factual support — in order to earn a 4 or 5.

  • Please get in a bit of review before sitting for the exam. Considering that you were given an option NOT to sit this exam, I expect each of you to put forth his best effort. Below is a basic list of the topics that the exam covers which we may not get to before 11 May.
  • DBQ – you MUST include the following to have a shot at a 5 on the AP exam: 1) thesis that addresses the prompt, 2) use ALL the docs, 3) group docs (contrasting opinions grouped too), 4) explain or analyze at least 3 Points of View

You should also face the fact that I do not expect to cover post-war (WWII) in much detail, and we will only get there AFTER you take the exam. This means that you will need to manage a brief ‘review’ to extract pure content. This can be handled in several ways: 1) check out one of the AP review books in the library and skim through the chapters on the 20th century, 2) Surf through this particularly good review site from Horace Greeley HS, 3)     , 4) and finally, READ, READ, READ! The Birdsl Viault ‘Modern European History’ gives great succinct overviews by period. The main post-’45 subjects covered:

  • NATO (HQ in Brussels) v Warsaw Pact (Ruskies and their communist stooges!)
  • creation of the EU: quite boring, 3 treaties (Paris 1951, Rome 1957, Maastricht, 1992)
  • why France can’t get along with anyone — one answer –> Charles de Gaulle — and the student protests (revolution?) of 1968
  • Eastern Bloc and collapse of the USSR: blame economy, Afghanistan, and M.Gorbachev, drunken Boris Yeltsin as hero, along with polish Pope John Paul II, and US Pres. Ronald Reagan; major benchmarks: Budapest 1956, Prague 1968, Gdansk 1980, Lithuania 1990.

A few Wikipedia articles might also be helpful. Here’s a partial list to get you started:

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