Each year, high school students worry about how they are supposed to prepare for their AP tests in May. Studying a year’s worth of heavy material may seem like a daunting task, especially within a short time frame. However, if you study little by little a couple weeks before the exam, it will seem a lot more reasonable. Here are some methods I, as well as others, have found to be helpful in the studying process:

Flashcards: These are great for all of those visual learners out there! Maybe draw little images/paste pictures on the back to help you remember concepts better. Using different colored cards is also very helpful!! *note: Obviously, you can’t make flashcards for everything you have to know because that would be absurd, so just make them for big topics/need-to-know-terms you want to review*

Crash Course guides: You can buy these pretty cheap on Amazon for most subjects. I cannot stress how helpful these are! If you don’t want to do a lot of work, this is the way to go. However, I don’t recommend just reading through it in a couple of hours because you WILL NOT retain the information. Try annotating/underlining/highlighting and drawing pictures in the margins, or leaving post-it notes on the pages you know you’ll want to refer back to. The Princeton Review books are also very helpful, but they contain much more information than you may be able to tackle in a couple of weeks. Barron’s Review Guide may also be a good review for both of them.

Talking: You have probably been told by your teachers over and over again that teaching your peers information and vice versa is the best way to learn… That’s because they are correct! Telling a story is the best way to retain information, so find someone, ANYONE, to teach a concept to! If you can talk about something and teach it, you will definitely know how to write about it, or answer a multiple-choice question about it.

I know that these tests seem really scary and important, but they are honestly just high school tests. They only take a few hours to take, and after that, it’s over. I know they can easily stress someone out but just try and remember that it will be over soon, and that all you can do is your best.