AP History SAQ Strategy: KEEP IT SIMPLE
Though your teacher may have different requirements during the school year, your SAQ approach for the exam should be as concise as possible.
The short-answer question (SAQ) section of the AP History exams is a great opportunity to concisely articulate your historical knowledge and thinking skills.
Unfortunately, a huge number of students bungle this opportunity. This is almost never their fault—many AP teachers are not clear on how to properly teach SAQ strategy. While the DBQ and the LEQ have reputations as the big, scary bad guys on the exam (and they can certainly be intimidating), this skewed perception unfortunately leads teachers and students to devote very little time to strategizing their approach to the SAQs. However, even when students do get good advice from their teachers, the SAQ section tends to be the area of the exam where graders see the most egregious examples of students over-writing, over-thinking, and over-doing.
The keys to a successful SAQ response? Be accurate, be complete, and BE CONCISE.
Remember—this performance task is called a SHORT ANSWER QUESTION. Please provide a SHORT ANSWER to the SHORT ANSWER QUESTION.
Your answer should be accurate, and it should be complete, but it must also be concise. And, yes, it is 100% possible for an answer to be all three of these things in the span of two or three sentences—sometimes even one. REALLY. The best SAQ responses I’ve seen have been no longer than three sentences.
Besides the mere fact that it is possible for you to give an excellent answer in 1-3 sentences, you should also remember that a good 1-3 sentence response will get the same amount of points as a good 5-7 sentence response. The only—and I mean only—difference? If you agonize over a longer response despite knowing that’s not the task at hand, you will (1) unnecessarily run down the clock on this very, very timed exam that you’re sitting for, and (2) force the person who gets stuck grading your overly long SAQ to rummage through a bunch of fluff to figure out if you’ve given a passable answer or not.
It’s not a good use of your (limited) time, and it makes your exam grader’s task more difficult.
Don’t waste your time on a task that you haven’t been asked to do because you have a misguided notion (or because a misguided teacher told you) that it’ll impress someone and net you some extra points. That’s not a thing. I promise you that’s not how it works, and it’s not going to happen. So get it out of your head, and start focusing on answering the question as quickly and succinctly as possible while maintaining accuracy and completeness!
The Foolproof Approach to SAQ Responses
Next time, I’ll be sharing a video tutorial that shows you how to read SAQ source materials, how to break down the questions, and then how to respond using the “TEA” formula for excellent three-sentence responses.
Make sure you’re subscribed, and please share far & wide! See you soon.