In your AP Human Geography class, you'll learn about the dynamics of societies around the world in economic, social, political, and environmental contexts. This course focuses a lot on ideas and models, along with terminology that defines the ways in which we've chosen to inhabit and change our surroundings.
This AP Human Geography study guide is designed to guide you through all the big concepts covered in the course, with an emphasis on cumulative preparation for the AP exam.
This guide will help you review for assessments in your AP Human Geography class by providing links to practice resources and tips on effective study strategies. I'll also give advice that's specific to preparing for the final AP exam.
In the first section, I'll detail a step-by-step process you can follow to create and execute a customized study plan for the test. This process includes taking a diagnostic test, evaluating your weaknesses, studying the content areas you struggled with the most, and taking additional practice tests to check your progress.
To follow up the study plan, I'll list a few key study tips to remember as you revisit the course content and take practice exams. I'll also give you notes for each topic area that you can use to study for in-class tests and review for the AP exam.
Having all this information in one place will hopefully make studying for AP Human Geography much less stressful!
In this section, I'll go through the steps of a basic study plan for the AP Human Geography exam. Most of the principles will also apply to your studying for tests throughout the class, but full practice tests are only important when directly preparing for the final exam.
You can use shorter topic-specific quizzes to diagnose your weaknesses in different units of the Human Geography course earlier in the school year.
For planning purposes, here's the estimated time required for each step below:
It should take approximately eight hours to study for the AP Human Geography exam. Of course, you can always extend the time you spend reviewing content if you're rusty on a bunch of different topics or just want to be extra thorough.
The first step is to take a full AP Human Geography practice test so you can get a better idea of your current score level. When you take the test, time it to the specifications of the real exam so you'll be able to tell if you have any issues with time management.
Keep in mind that on the test, you only have an hour to answer 60 multiple-choice questions; this comes out to a minute per question. To be on the safe side, though, try to get your time down to around 45 seconds per question. The only way to get used to this pace is to take practice tests under realistic conditions.
As you take the practice test, circle or make note of any questions for which you feel anything less than totally confident in your answer. Even if you end up getting these questions right, you should reexamine the content later in your review to increase your comfort level with the material.
When you're done, score your test so you can see where you fall in the AP range. You can use this online calculator for a decent score estimation based on how many raw points you earned.
Then, set a goal for improvement, and decide how many hours you'll need to put into your prep.
If you have a couple of months, you should be able to put in 20+ hours of study time. This will be an appropriate amount of studying if you're hoping to improve by more than one AP point.
If you only need to improve by one AP point or are just looking to raise your score within the same range, you might be able to wait until the month before the test to start the rest of the process. In total, you shouldn't need to study for more than 10-20 hours.
If you decide to begin the rest of this process now, go through your mistakes on the Human Geography practice test and categorize them. This is how you'll decide which content and skill areas to focus on in your review.
There's no point in studying concepts and terms you've already mastered. If you want to see real improvements, this is the most important stage of the study process. You can't fix your mistakes unless you know what they are first!
After you finish analyzing your mistakes, start looking at notes that correspond to the areas where you had the most trouble on the test. Make sure you're fully absorbing the information as you read.
In this case, flashcards might be useful because there are so many terms to remember for AP Human Geography. If you found the free-response questions especially challenging, practice a few more of those before you move on to the next step.
You can also use some of the sites I'll link to later in this article to review specific topics with short multiple-choice quizzes.
When you feel that you've fully addressed all your mistakes on the first practice test, you can take a second test to see whether your scores have improved. Compare your new score to the goal you set in the first step, and decide whether you want to go through the study process again or are happy with your current score.
If you're satisfied, you can take a break and just do a bit of light review up until the test.
If you haven't improved, reevaluate how you conducted this process and make some changes to your strategy in the next round. Were you in an environment that was too distracting? Did you skim over your notes without really absorbing them? Are you just generally a bit rusty? These are the kinds of things that can cause your progress to stall.
Clean off that rust with an acidic solution of facts.
Below are a few of the most valuable strategies to keep in mind as you go through your study plan to prepare for the AP Human Geography exam. These tips should also be helpful for your prep for smaller assessments throughout the school year in your AP class.
To get full credit for most free-response questions, you'll have to provide specific examples to support your answers. This means being able to identify the characteristics of world regions in terms of their various cultures, demographics, and physical environments.
You'll see a map of the major regions covered by AP Human Geography in the content section of this guide along with a list of seven units. You should be able to locate each region and identify the relationship it has with each of the seven topic areas.
While knowing your way around a map is important, much of AP Human Geography is about your knowledge of terminology. I highly recommend making flashcards or using online flashcards in your prep (I'll put a link to some of these in the upcoming content section!).
Many multiple-choice questions are essentially just asking for definitions, and some free-response questions begin by asking you to define a term that the rest of the question addresses in more depth.
Even if it's not this direct, knowing your way around the language of the field of human geography will make it far easier for you to understand questions without relying on shaky assumptions or inferences.
Human Geography is mostly considered a humanities subject, but there are some scientific elements to it. These show up in the form of demographic models that are introduced throughout the course.
It's important to know how to read models and understand what they represent. You should also know how they connect to major theories in human geography and what those theories say about the development of society.
I'll give you a link to a comprehensive list of models and theories at the end of the next section.
Skylar, how many times do I have to explain homophones to you? YOU'RE. NOT. HELPING.
AP Human Geography covers seven major topic areas, or units. In this section, I'll list each of them followed by notes that cover relevant subtopics. You can use these notes in the content review stage of your final study process and throughout the year as you review for in-class tests.
You might find these notes (from CourseNotes) difficult to get through because they're written in such a way that it's hard to pick out key concepts. There are a lot of long paragraphs with no bolding of important terms. If you find these notes borderline incomprehensible, you should try getting a review book that puts all the content in clearer terms. I think Cracking the AP Human Geography Exam is a good starting point.
As a precursor to the notes, here's a map of all the world regions that are discussed throughout the course. You'll need to consider how these topics apply differently to varying locations around the globe:
