Introduction
While you work on your AP® Macroeconomics review, you’ll want to pay some special attention to how you’ll deal with the AP® Macroeconomics free response questions. Along with the AP® Macroeconomics multiple choice questions, which you can find ways to score big, the AP® Macroeconomics free response is another major part of the AP® Macro exam. In this post, you’ll find strategies for tackling the AP® Macroeconomics free response questions.
1. Most important, do as much practice as you can.
By far the most important strategy for preparing to tackle the AP® Macroeconomics free response section is to practice as much as you can! Taking practice exams will help you pin down the types of questions you can expect to see, and exactly what types of answers you’re expected to supply. Checking your answers afterward can be particularly useful, as you’ll get an idea of what is being looked for in a good free response answer. It will also help you with timing, and making sure that you know to label graphs – two strategies that we’ll touch on later on in this post. All told, practice exams will be far and away the best strategy available to you as you prepare for the AP® Macroeconomics free response section. You can find practice questions in the review books that we’ll mention a little later or in Albert.io’s Free Response section. However, for the AP® Macroeconomics, free response there’s also an official CollegeBoard option! If you search on collegeboard, you can actually find both the questions and answers to all the previous AP® Macroeconomics free response sections. This gives you an enormous supply of free response sections to work from and refine your test-taking abilities with!
2. Make sure you’ve got the graphs down, and don’t forget to label!
As you go through your AP® Macroeconomics review, you’ll find that graphs are incredibly important. Most of the key concepts in AP® Econ will be attached in some way to a graph. So it should come as no surprise that the AP® Macroeconomics free response questions usually involve them! The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that you’ve mastered the graphs associated with all the main concepts of AP® Macro. Be prepared not just to understand and interpret them, but also to make changes to them and use them to explain the concepts. For some of the AP® Macroeconomics free response questions, you’ll be asked to show and use graphs like this. When you do so, be sure to label everything! Under labeling is one of the most common mistakes made on the AP® Macroeconomics free response. So when in doubt, label!
However, because graphs are such an integral part of AP® Macro, you’ll find that they’re useful for your AP® Macroeconomics free response even when they aren’t explicitly asked for. They can help you when you are asked to explain a concept, and they can also help you on your scratch paper as you try to tease out what the right answer is. So you’ve got to make sure you know your graphs! Some particularly important graphs are the loanable funds market, the Production Possibilities Curve, and aggregate supply and demand.
3. Time yourself.
You’ll only have an hour (including reading time, which we’ll focus on in a later strategy) to get through the three questions you need to answer in the AP® Macroeconomics free response section. This means that timing is going to be important. You can’t allow yourself to get hung-up trying to answer or perfect your answer to one question for too long, or else you won’t have time to give well-reasoned responses to the remaining questions. For instance, make sure that the logic of your answer makes sense and that you’ve labeled, but don’t worry about grammar. Check for keywords to know what your answer should look like: show, identify, calculate, explain. A strategy for preparing for this is to time yourself while you take practice AP® Macroeconomics free response questions. First, see how long it takes you to tackle one free response section from a practice exam. You’ll have 60 minutes total for free response questions, where 10 minutes of that is for reading and planning. In the 50 minutes, you’ll have one long question and two short questions you need to finish. Then, if you took too long, try to take a step back and evaluate where you got stuck. Did you spend too long trying to perfect one answer? Did you spend too long on one question where you never came up with an answer? Did you flip between a couple possible answers for too long? Once you know what took so much time, try another set of questions and try to work on your mistakes. Once you feel yourself getting a rhythm, be sure to time yourself taking one set of questions, replicating the feeling of the exam itself.
4. Get yourself a review book.
Review books can be amazingly helpful in preparing for the AP® Macro exam, and in particular the AP® Macroeconomics free response section. Review books will give you an overview of the key concepts that you need to know for your AP® Econ studies. They also tend to have additional tips relevant to the free response questions. Finally, they’re a great source of additional practice exams, and as we’ve seen practicing AP® Macroeconomics free response questions is one of the best strategies available to you. Barron’s puts out their AP® Microeconomics/Macroeconomics review book every year, and it is highly recommended. It’s a particularly good book if you need a review book that will dig deep into the details of AP® Macroeconomics. If you don’t think you need such detail, but still want some the help and practice questions, another recommended book is the Princeton Reviews annual Cracking the AP® Economics Macro and Micro Exams.
5. Use flash cards for the key concepts.
Flash cards are a great strategy for preparing to tackle the AP® Macroeconomics free response. One reason for this is the relevance of formulas. To answer some of the questions, you’re going to need to be sure that you’ve reviewed, understand, and can apply many of the formulas you’ll come across in your studies. This is where flash cards can make a big difference. However, this is not the only reason. There are also simply a lot of concepts, terms, and definitions that will be important to understand. Flash cards are always useful for getting your definitions and basic concepts down. Some other macroeconomics concepts that lend themselves well to flash cards are national income accounts, economic growth, and financial markets. Flash cards will help you make sure that you’ve memorized what you need to know for the exam.
6. Always put down something, and remain consistent!
Most of our previous strategies focused on preparing for the exam, but with these last two strategies we’d like to give you some helpful tips on approaching the exam while your actually taking it.
First, for each part of the free response questions that you come across, be sure to at least put something down! While it’s probably not as easy to luck into getting the right answer like it is with the multiple choice section, the free response section has something multiple choice doesn’t – partial credit. So put down the best answer that you can, and you may have gotten close enough to get some partial credit! Just be sure to never leave anything blank!
Now, let’s say you have some trouble on the second part of a free response question, but you’ve still got a few parts to go, how do you handle this? The best thing you can do is to remain consistent. Even if you got a wrong answer earlier, if you’ve remained consistent and gotten the logic right on the next part, you’ll still receive credit! So don’t worry if you have trouble with an early part, just stay consistent and you can still get all the available points further into that question.
7. Use the reading time wisely.
Finally, let’s talk about those 10 minutes of reading time that they give you at the beginning of the AP® Macroeconomics free response question. You’ll wish that you could start writing immediately, but instead use those 10 minutes wisely. Be sure to take this time to read all of the questions, and make sure that you understand what is going on in each question that they ask you. Then, take this time to start connecting your thoughts together. Plan to tackle the easy questions first, to make sure you get those points out of the way. Be sure to think about the relevant graphs you’ll need for the questions. This will help you make sure that you’re giving a full, clear, and concise answer to each of the questions.
Conclusion
This post gave you some actionable strategies to use both before and during the AP® Macro exam to help you tackle the AP® Macroeconomics free response section. First and foremost, you’ve got to practice, and this strategy will help you work on some other strategies we touched on including working on your timing and making sure that you have a firm handle on all the graphs that are integral to AP® Econ. To practice, you can use the questions available in some great AP® Econ review books that you should pick up, or you can simply go to Collegeboard and use previous years’ exams. To ensure you have the key formulas and concepts down, try utilizing flash cards in your studying. Finally, once you are actually taking the test, you’ll need some more strategies. Always be sure that you label everything on your graphs. You don’t want to lose a couple points simply because you forgot to label an axis! Be sure to use the 10 minutes of reading at the beginning to collect your thoughts, and always remember to put at least something down! Do you know of any other useful strategies for the AP® Macroeconomics free response section? Let us know in the comments!
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