How to ACE the DIGITAL MCQ [When You CAN'T Return to Previous Questions]

hey there and welcome back to heidler's history now it is ap exam season and i am doing my best to help you get prepared and as you no doubt know by now there will be a digital testing option for this year's exam and one of the main anxiety students have about that is that they are not allowed to go back and forth on the multiple choice questions once you answer it is done so what i would like to do is to offer you some advice and strategies for taking the multiple choice section of the exam when you cannot return to the previous question so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked well then let's get to it strategy number one take your time you were given 55 minutes to complete the multiple choice section of the exam and in that time you have 55 questions to answer now i'm just a humble history teacher but if my math is right that works out to about one minute per question and that means if you know that you're not going to be able to go back to a question make sure you spend every second of that minute making sure that you feel confident about that answer now that advice is complicated a little by the fact that the multiple choice questions are stimulus-based multiple choice questions which means that you'll be using part of that time to read the passage or interpret the image but here's the way you manage it in general every stimulus has two to four questions attached to it so for example if you have a stimulus that has three questions then you know that you can devote three minutes to it including the time it takes to interpret the stimulus so you can keep track of that time on the timer included in the digital testing app or you can do it with some other time keeping device now i know that sounds like it'll introduce even more stress but if you start practicing now then when the test time comes you'll be used to it so make sure you spend every available second on every question strategy number two practice eliminating wrong answers in my experience when a student looks at a multiple choice question they begin by looking for the right answer and you know i understand that you're under stress you want to put something down on the answer sheet and you want that stress to be over but the best advice i can give you is to begin by looking for the wrong answers and eliminating them now of course there are some questions that you get to and you just know it sure as the sun rises every morning that's fine but this advice is specifically for the questions that you're not 100 sure on it helps here to know how these questions are written every multiple choice question on your exam is going to have four answers for you to choose from and the writers of these questions have a formula that they follow two questions are obviously wrong and if you know your material you're going to know that they are wrong then there's the right answer and then they include what's called a distractor which sounds like an evil plot from the college board overlords designed to make you fail but it's really just a way to separate those who really know their stuff from those who only kind of know it the distractor looks kind of right but in the context of the question it will be wrong and to be clear every potential answer they give you is going to be historically accurate like you're never going to see an answer that is patently false like see the spanish-american war was fought between the romans and the mongols you're never going to see anything like that the wrong answers are going to be wrong not because they are factually inaccurate but for one of two reasons first it'll be wrong because the event and the answer is outside of the time period of the prom for example what was a major political effect of industrialization answer the creation of the united nations now you could draw a convoluted line of causation from industrialization to the u.n but in general that answer is wrong because it is not in the same time period as the main movements of industrialization now to be clear there will come questions where the correct answer is outside of the time period but they will let you know that that's what they're asking the second general reason an answer will be obviously wrong is because the historical thinking skill does not match for example if you have a question on the causes of the spanish-american war and you have an answer that includes the annexation of the philippines then that is obviously wrong why because the annexation of the philippines wasn't in effect not a cause of the spanish-american war so that gives you a little taste of how the obviously wrong answers will look now those aren't the only two ways that they can be wrong but in my experience those are the two most common so how do you get better at eliminating those two wrong answers well as you're studying you need to make sure that you have all of your events situated in their proper time period and second you need to pay attention to your historical thinking skills like don't just study vocabulary study the causes and effects of that vocabulary or the changes in continuities that occurred over time or how this event or person or state compares with others so once you eliminate those answers you are left with two possibilities the distractor and the right answer and if you've studied well i hope you'll see the distractor for what it is and choose the right answer strategy three understand how the scoring works and this isn't a strategy as much as a mindset that will hopefully eliminate some stress when you get to question 30 and something makes you realize that you got number five wrong like don't worry you can actually miss quite a few and still be set for a five now the metric changes every year but historically if you get about 72 to 75 percent of the multiple choice questions right you're still in the game to earn a five on your exam that means you can miss like 14 or 15 questions and still be just fine now again those numbers change every year but over the last 10 years or so that's been the threshold so you know if you miss one fine on the digital exam the most important questions are the ones that are ahead of you okay well i hope that helps relieve a little stress this is a crazy year for ap exams so if you want more help feel free to grab my ultimate review packet right here and don't forget to subscribe because i'll be doing a lot of these videos leading up to exam time heimler out

Channel: Heimler's History

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Length: 5min 2sec (302 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021