Are you thinking about taking Advanced Placement (AP) German? Taking the AP® German Language exam is beneficial for many reasons. Two important reasons include getting college credit and demonstrating knowledge of a world language spoken in approximately 40 countries! Receiving college credit will allow you to take more advanced German classes in the future and potentially fulfill some liberal art requirements as well.

Getting to know this world language through AP® German will also allow you to learn how to write, read, and speak in German; as well as comprehend the German language orally. As if this wasn’t enough, you will also unlock opportunities both personal and professional by being able to communicate with a country full of delightful people and places to visit.

These are some of the benefits of taking AP® German, but is taking it hard? This is a loaded question. It is hard if you do not know what you are signing up for, but this article will show you that AP® German is not hard if you know how to master the approach to the language and exam. This article will go over the exam scoring history, structure of the exam, difficult aspects of each section, how to conquer each section and the benefits of taking the AP® German Language exam.

AP® German Language Exam Scoring History

The success rate for the AP® German Language exam is relatively high compared to other AP® exams over the past three years. Here is a breakdown of the percentage of passing grades as well as the percentage of 5’s achieved over the past three years:

Another important statistic to know about the history of the exam is that over the past three years more than 65% of the exam takers took an AP® German class within their schooling system.

It’s important to note that the exam was restructured in 2012, meaning when studying for the exam make sure the material is associated with the AP® German Language exam from the year 2012 or later. Another piece of helpful information is that, over the past few exams, students have struggled with the text interpretation of the multiple choice section as well as the oral speaking portion of the exam. During the difficulties portion of this post, we will work through key things to study and focus on so that we strengthen areas that students have historically performed poorly on as well as strengthen the portion that students have historically done well.

Structure of the AP® German Exam

First, we will go over a quick breakdown of how the exam is sectioned out. The exam is broken into two parts, multiple choice and free response, both of which are worth 50% of the final score. Pretty simple huh? Well, now we will go over each part separately, break them down further, look at ways to best prepare, and what to expect in each section.

The multiple choice section is divided into two parts, a text interpretation portion and a listening portion, together encapsulating roughly 65 questions. In the 2017 AP® German Language exam, these 65 questions were divided relatively evenly, with 30 questions being in the text interpretation and 35 in the listening portion. Each portion has a time limit associated with it. You will have 40 minutes to complete the text interpretation section, whereas you will have roughly 55 minutes to complete the listening portion.

The listening section is a set recording played during the examination, and therefore its length determines the speed of the portion.

The first 30 questions of the exam are text interpretation in the form of a printed text. The format of the presented text will vary, but in the past, they have included advertisements for products or locations, short basic scientific passages, comparing a similar text and graphics, as well as personal letters. This variety shows the breadth at which the text-based questions are fielded, including subjects from formal writing to informal blurbs. The exam ensures the student can understand the language in many contexts and not just plain typed text.

The next 35 questions in the multiple choice section cover the listening portion of this part of the exam. Once again the exam creators tried to portray multiple aspects of the German language and create an exam to test you on a holistic view of the language. The passages that you will listen to vary. In the past, they have included actual interviews recorded on television or radio, published podcasts, as well as conversations between two individuals. These conversations may be formal or informal from year to year.

After each section of listening, you will have time to answer questions covering the context of the piece. These questions may be very specific about a particular occurrence or broader about the meaning of the entire portion you previously listened to. There are two positives associated with the listening portion; the first is that you get to have a minute before the speaking portion begins to look over the questions, and you get to listen to the listening portion twice.

Following the completion of the multiple-choice portion of the exam, you will continue onto the free response portion. This portion is focused on written, speaking, and listening skills. This portion of the exam is where you can let your knowledge of German grammar and vocabulary flourish. The multiple choice section is a rather elementary as you are selecting which answer fits best. However, in the free response section, you can show how well you command the language regarding grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure in both written as well as spoken form.

Once again the free response section is similar to the multiple choice section regarding being broken up into multiple parts. The free-response section of the AP® German Language exam is split into two parts, one being the written responses and the other the spoken responses. Each of these sections is broken down further, with the written responses divided up into a 15-minute interpersonal written response and a longer 55-minute persuasive essay.

The spoken section is similarly divided into an interpersonal response and a presentational response on a cultural comparison. The times for these two parts may vary depending on the amount of information you choose to include. However, you are given a maximum of 20 seconds to respond to each of the five prompts during the interpersonal portion, and you receive 4 minutes to plan and 2 minutes to speak during the presentational response.

This concludes the structural outline of the exam. As you can see the exam creators try to encompass many different presentation styles of the German language to quiz you on how well you know German as a whole and, this is a great advantage to you. How may you ask? We will cover that in the next portion about the difficulties of the exam and how to best prepare.

Difficulties and how to Combat Them

Now that you know how the exam is structured, we will compile a study guide along with tips and tricks so that you can master the AP® German Language exam. To begin let’s consider some difficulties within the exam itself so that we may know how to tackle them. As discussed above, the exam is created to offer a broad range of topics and applications of the language in a variety of settings. To some exam takers, this may be daunting, as each section individually would look like a massive list of things to do. However, we will develop our little tricks to simplify the exam and master it.

As mentioned in the Exam scoring history section, students have historically struggled with two sections. The first being the multiple choice text interpretation. This is due to a variety of reasons, one being that the passages vary widely in degrees of difficulty and length. Many of the questions are purely about the context of the passage, such as where is the conversation taking place; what is the main topic; and what tone is the passage written in? Often these are the first few questions after the passage.

A good tip to conquer these questions is to take or underline key phrases or sentences that help you understand the passage. Another good exam strategy is to not spend too much time on the last few questions of each passage. These questions are often more difficult as they ask the student to relate the passage to indirect context not specifically mentioned in the text.

You may feel tempted to try and solve these and by doing this, spend a lot of time on these questions. This is a common mistake, as the simple multiple choice questions are equally weighted. If you spend too much time on these difficult questions, you may not get to read the entire last article and answer the associated questions, therefore, missing many easy points that will pump your score up.

The second section of the exam that students historically have struggled with is the speaking portion of the exam. This is often a problem when speaking in a language that is not your native tongue, especially in an exam setting. Many students get a form of stage freight where they freeze up and are scared that anything they say may be wrong. This can happen and is a reason why this section is historically so difficult. Being scared of saying something wrong creates fear in test takers that then gets exaggerated to the point that students are uncertain about everything else they know how to say.

There are two simple tips to solve this issue; the first is to be confident. If you forget a word do not fret about it, describe the word the best you can and continue your answer. The second tip is speaking or reading out loud in German. This can be done by just describing your daily habits such as I am riding my bike to school, or I am at school. Saying things out loud breaks down that fear of speaking in a foreign language out loud by letting your body hear you speak in a foreign language.

Now that we have discussed the difficult historical parts of the exam let’s talk about some study tips to make the rest of the exam a breeze too. Sadly, there are no real great review books for AP® German on the market. However, there are some other books that may be helpful for certain sections. We will discuss those at the end of this section. Not to worry, all you need to master AP® German are these three things; listening; speaking; reading. You may think these are obvious, and they are, but how do you prepare for them.

The number one tip used by students that ace AP® German is listening to German podcasts, news, and movies. This gets you used to hearing the language in a daily context, and a neat thing about this is you can watch anything you are interested in. The most important part is getting the exposure.

At first, you may only pick up some short blurbs, but as you continue, more and more words will naturally be absorbed into your natural vocabulary. This helps two fold. First, you learn how to make sense of passages during which you may only know a few chucks. Secondly, it builds your speaking vocabulary. Having a vast vocabulary for speaking will aid you to work around words you may blank on during the exam.

Watching movies, you already know well, in German. Better yet watching them in German with German subtitles. This will connect your vocabulary base to your auditory base, and help you understand sentence structure as well as build your interpretation skills. The key tip here is to watch movies you already know because then you are familiar with the plot, you already know roughly what is being said in English, so you are purely making the connections of the spoken German and the written German subtitles to the familiar context.

The two examples above will help you make the listening and the text interpretation easier by broadening your daily German vocabulary. Some other small tips to conquer the AP® German exam is flash cards with common vocabulary words you may forget. These can be handmade or online, but the main point is seeing the words you think are vital. The key here is you, as the written portion is made for you to show your personality you want to be prepared with words you feel comfortable using. So make yourself some flash cards and practice seeing and reading the words out loud, hint there are now apps with pre made vocabulary word lists on them.

Finally, reading out loud is great. It breaks down barriers of fear and empowers you to think and hear yourself speak German. If you can master this, you are already halfway to a 5. A book that may help you while studying is “Einfach Grammatik”, this is a great refresher on some basic grammar for sentence structure and basic composition of the text.

Benefits of Taking AP® German Language

As mentioned above the AP® German Language exam is a great way to achieve college credit and gain access to the wonderful world of the German language. The benefits reach far past college credit, and a simple AP® score. Continuing to build on your AP® German experience in college will benefit you continuously throughout life.

Mastering the exam will allow you to delve into higher level German classes in college such as German literature, German modern and social culture, and German history classes. All of these will add to academic experience no matter if you plan on being an engineer, scientist, or a German major. Coming into college with college credit in a language, especially German, will provide you with a leg up no matter what industry you go into. And hey as long as you practice daily your reading and listening skills the AP® German Language exam will be a breeze.

If you have other tips on how to ease your way to a passing score in AP® German, let us know!

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