AP History: The Keys to Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) Success (Pt. 1) — It's all in the DETAILS! - "Byline" Edition

If you’ve got a kid taking an AP History class, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the many different tasks on the test. One full half of their score is devoted to the multiple choice questions, otherwise known as the MCQ section.

Though much time, energy, and effort is rightfully devoted to the FRQ (free-response question, AKA essays) section, this often results in a lack of adequate preparation for the equally-difficult and equally-important MCQs. As I mentioned above, the MCQs are worth HALF of your student’s grade on their exam, so it’s extremely important that they have solid strategies for approaching this section.

Wait, strategies? Shouldn’t they just know their stuff?

Ah, you’d think so. You’d maybe even hope or wish so! However, the College Board—as much as I like to complain about them and other purveyors of standardized exams—do have a tough task with writing this exam, and I think they actually do a decent job approaching the challenge.

See, the problem with writing a standardized exam for a subject like AP US History is that there are thousands of teachers all over the country (and worldwide, actually) who are teaching this course to their own tastes and preferences. Of course, the College Board provides a framework, and they must approve all syllabi for a course to be technically approved as an AP course.

As you can imagine, however, that doesn’t change the inevitable reality that there will be major variations in teaching style, approach, quality, rigor, and focus. Thus, instead of giving students a standardized exam on materials that will have been taught to them in a decidedly unstandardized manner, the College Board focuses instead on testing students on the core “historical thinking skills” teachers should have been teaching students throughout the course: the ability to contextualize; the ability to use source materials to find evidence to corroborate positions; the ability to compare and contrast historical developments; and the ability to chart change and continuity over time; among a few other less key skills.

My point being: Yes, of course—the more historical content knowledge your student brings into the exam, the better. However, any and every student will be better-equipped to approach the exam with a strong understanding of the underlying structure and purpose of the exam, as well as the types of questions they will encounter, than they will be with simple content knowledge alone. And even a student who is slightly lacking in content knowledge can make the best of the materials they are given and still do quite well when they know how the test works.

Ok, I’m getting it. But, how does this fit in with MCQs specifically?

This is particularly true with the multiple choice questions (and the SAQs and DBQs, for that matter), which will always provide the student with some kind of “stimulus” they must use in order to answer the following 2-3 questions.

The “stimulus” will range from an excerpt from a modern textbook to an excerpt from a teenager’s journal found in the ruins of a Mayan village to a map of the world drawn by a Central European monk in the year 1352—you get the idea. The range of stimuli is wide. The range of question types, however, is not as wide.

All of the question types will be asking students to either: contextualize the source material; draw a comparison or make a contrast from the source material and something in the question; analyze change and/or continuity over time from the source material; utilize evidence from the source material to answer a practical historiographical question; or analyze cause and/or effect based on the source material.

So, without further ado…

MCQ Strategy 1A: Pay attention to detail when reading the “byline” for the source material.

The MCQs are all about detail. Call it what you want—some call it outright trickery, and I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s wrong—but, no matter what, the College Board is definitely looking to reward attention to detail in this section.

The first chance to reap the rewards is in the “byline” of the source material!

See above: This is the bottom half of an MCQ source from an AP European History exam. Notice that after the source ends (after the quotation marks), there is an indented line that states the name “James Cook” along with a title, “British naval officer,” a brief synopsis of the excerpt (“describing the inhabitants of Australia”), and a year, “1770.”

The beauty of the “byline” (thus named because it usually tells us who the source is “by,” though depending on the source type, that is not always the most accurate way to describe it) is that it gives students a LOT of information upfront, regardless of their level of content knowledge.

Students can and should ALWAYS read the byline before they read the source material. The source material is frequently dense and sometimes borderline-incomprehensible. It’s often esoteric, confusing, and sometimes seems unrelated to the questions.

This is why, before reading the source material, and way before reading the questions that go along with it, students must read that byline.

Now, your student may or may not recognize the name James Cook. They may or may not even know what a naval officer is or how to find Australia on a map, for all I know. I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t matter! They just need to take what they can from it. Any information they can glean from the byline will help them navigate the source material. For example, the year “1770” situates the student in the historical moment in which the source was written. The synopsis also tells us that this is a primary source (an original source document used to understand a historical event, as opposed to a textbook or an analytical historical text).

With just these two bits of information, the student goes into the source armed with some level of historical context, a definitive time period, an understanding of what the text will be “about,” and an expectation for potential point of view and purpose. That’s a LOT of information to have going into a source before even having read it.

In other words, it’s an easy, quick tip with a BIG payoff.

Next up: MCQ Strategy 1B: Pay attention to detail (but don’t go overboard) when analyzing the source itself.

Tune in tomorrow for the next installment in the AP History MCQ - Details series. Please subscribe, comment, and share far and wide! We’re just getting started!

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