As Advanced Placement (AP) exam season arrives once again, many students are scrambling to prepare for the biggest test of the academic year. At a high school that offers so many AP courses, it can be a very stressful time of year, and reviewing can be hard to tackle due to the amount material these exams cover.

Workbooks and prepared flashcard sets are a waste of money unless you use them for a significant and well distributed period of time. Companies like Barron and The Princeton Review make similar materials, but they can be pricey. Most students can make their own flashcards, which actually helps study and saves money.

The best place to start as exams approach is with your notes. Most science and social studies courses at P-CEP are lecture oriented, which means you should have hand-written or guided notes to look over. English courses are usually discussion based. That means there should be discussion summaries that you wrote or were given by your teacher for you to refresh yourself on readings.

Once you’ve gone over your notes, you should have a much better idea of what you do not understand yet. From there the best thing to do is refer to secondary resources specifically for these topics. In science courses, YouTube is your best friend. Channels like CrashCourse and Bozeman Science would be the most credible. Bozeman also offers actual AP reviews that cover multiple topics. Many teachers and professors also produce video lectures on specific topics that are great for reviewing material.

In the final hours, or days, if you’re lucky, the best way to review for a test is to practice taking the test. Once you have spent time refreshing on content, you want to practice applying that content. After all, the exam will require that you understand the information well enough to apply it for most of the questions. The AP website even offers released tests for practice questions to use while reviewing.

Science and math courses are likely to require that you can pick out the necessary numbers and properly apply the math concepts taught. English courses are going to ask that you can intelligently discuss and analyze the literary themes of the readings covered in the course. History and social studies course are going to require that you can identify and intelligently discuss the concepts of government, economy and psychology in the past and present.

If your teacher has not led any review outside of class or suggested ways for you to do so independently, it never hurts to ask. It always helps to have a teacher narrow things down for you. Talk to your AP teachers about what they think will be heavily focused on.