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Choose a pre-built study schedule that fits your timeline. Each plan includes lessons, quizzes, practice, and review tasks — automatically scheduled for you.
Fast review of core African American Studies topics — perfect for students who need a quick refresher before the exam.
Balanced study schedule covering all African American Studies units with lessons, quizzes, practice, and flashcard drills.
In-depth study plan covering all African American Studies units with practice problems, FRQ practice, and multiple review cycles.
Plans are added to your dashboard Study Planner where you can track progress, check off tasks, and adjust the schedule.
These study plans break exam prep into a day-by-day schedule, with options sized for different timelines — from a full runway down to a final-weeks push. Whichever plan you pick is added to your dashboard planner, where you can check off tasks and adjust the pace as you go. Choose the one that matches the time you actually have.
AP African American Studies is an interdisciplinary course, now a fully recognized AP offering, that examines the experiences, contributions, and history of African Americans from the African origins of the African diaspora to the present. Drawing on history, literature, the arts, political science, geography, and the sciences, the course is organized into four units: Origins of the African Diaspora; Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance; The Practice of Freedom; and Movements and Debates. Students analyze primary and secondary sources, works of art and literature, data, and historical documents to understand themes such as identity, migration, resistance, culture, and the ongoing struggle for civil rights and full citizenship. A distinctive feature of the course is the Individual Student Project, a substantial research project that students develop over several weeks and defend, which counts toward the overall AP score alongside the timed exam. The course emphasizes source analysis and evidence-based argumentation similar to AP history courses, but its interdisciplinary scope means students engage with cultural production, demographic data, and intellectual debates, not just political events. Because the discipline is relatively new as an AP course, students benefit from closely studying the official course framework, which specifies the required sources and learning objectives. The exam's document-based and short-answer questions reward the ability to read sources critically, situate them in historical context, and build supported arguments. The most effective preparation combines mastering the four units' content, practicing source analysis and timed writing, and investing seriously in the Individual Student Project, since it carries meaningful weight. The timed portion of the exam is fully digital in Bluebook.
Section I: 60 multiple-choice questions (70 min, 60%) plus a 1-question Individual Student Project validation (10 min, 1.5%); Section II: 3 short-answer questions (40 min, 18%) and 1 document-based question (45 min, 12%). The Individual Student Project, completed over about three weeks with an oral defense, counts 8.5%. Timed exam is about 2 hours 45 minutes, fully digital in Bluebook.
Weighted points from the multiple-choice, short-answer, document-based question, project-validation question, and the Individual Student Project combine into a composite that converts to the AP 1-5 scale.