Welcome to Advanced Placement European History! For those of you who are unfamiliar it, A. is program that gives students an opportunity to take college-level courses and exams while still in high school. More than 14,000 high schools participate in AP and more than 4,000 colleges accept AP credit. Nationally, the College Entrance Examination Board offers thirty-three exams in twenty-three subject areas. (These are the same people who administer the SAT and a variety of other college entrance exams.) Hamilton High School currently offers seven such exams in the following areas: European History, United States History, Art History, Calculus, Chemisty, English Literature, and Psychology. A student enrolled in these courses can complete his/her first semester of college while still in high school, saving valuable time and money.
Students enrolled in AP at Hamilton study for twenty-seven school weeks (that is three nine-week quarters), from September until the beginning of April. (Students enrolled in AP Art History or Psychology study for eighteen weeks.) Specifically, in European History, you will study a wide variety of political, social, economic, and intellectual patterns in Western civilization. Then in early May, you have the opportunity to take a national exam that will determine whether or not you receive college credit.
Goals of the Advanced Placement Program in European History
In addition to providing a basic exposure to the factual narrative, the goals of this class are to develop:
Success in this class will require a level of responsibility, cooperation, and interaction, which you may not have experienced before. Your individual effort will consist of reading, writing, analyzing, synthesizing, and greatly expanding your base of knowledge. It is very important that you complete all the required readings and the related assignments. Always remember that I am here to help you, and you are here to help each other. If there is ever anything you do not understand, let me know in a respectful manner, and we will try to figure it out together. If there are any changes that you feel need to be made in the class, please make me aware of those as well. I take student concerns very seriously and am always willing to listen to you. This class changed a lot over the course of the past four years, and it was mostly related to suggestions from students. With these things in mind, it is my hope that this will becoming one of the most rewarding classes of your high school career.
Required Supplies
You must provide a five subject notebook, looseleaf paper, and a binder to save all handouts (start with this). The textbook is Jackson Spielvogel's Western Civilization, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003). This will be supplemented with readings on political, economic, social, intellectual, and cultural history, including fiction and non-fiction of both primary and secondary natures. There will also be one feature film per semester and various documentaries throughout the year.
Organization of the Course and Tentative Timetable
Required Skills
"History" may defined as "the telling of the past." This is usually done through writing. With this in mind, you will have written homework nearly every night. Normally, this will require you to read passages from the text (a "secondary source") and answer questions in sentences or paragraphs. You will frequently be required to identify the significance of key vocabulary words and significant individuals and will analyze primary sources, usually one per night.
Short writing assignments will occur every few days in class, with full essays required approximately every one to two weeks. Many of the assignments in class will involve historical documents, maps, tables, charts, works of art, and pictorial and graphic materials. You will write about two dozen essays over the course of the year, of which approximately one-third will be of the document-based variety.
Evaluation of Achievement
Your achievement in this course will be assessed and recognized in two ways. One will be a ½ unit per quarter (1.5 units total) and will become part of your high school record (A, B, C, D, or U). The other (5, 4, 3, 2, or 1) will determine whether you have qualified to earn college credits. Because this course is based on challenging college-level material, your grade will be assessed on a curved scale, with at least 50% of all possible points being required for an "A" or "B." Quarterly grades will be broken down according into the following categories:
Unit Tests = 25% Participation = 20% Assignments = 20% Chapter Quizzes = 10% Quarterly Final Exam = 25%
Unit tests will be part multiple choice and part essay. They will be evaluated according to the AP grading system (to be explained later in class). Quizzes will be multiple choice (take-home) and short answer (in-class) and will relate to the required readings and the material covered in class. The in-class portion of the chapter quizzes is open-notebook so it is to your advantage to take good notes, both in and out of class. Your participation in class is also very important. What "participation" is exactly is often hard to define, but for the purposes of this class, each student will be expected to do the following:
The examination is three hours and five minutes in length. It consists of a fifty-five--minute multiple choice section and a 130-minute free-response section.
The multiple choice section consists of eighty questions designed to measure your knowledge of European history. Approximately one-half of the questions deal with the period from 1450 to 1815 and one-half from 1815 to the present. Approximately 20 to 30 percent of the questions focus on cultural-intellectual themes, 30 to 40 percent of the questions focus on political-diplomatic themes, and 30 to 40 percent on social-economic themes.
Section II, the free-response section, begins with a mandatory fifteen-minute reading period followed by Part A, in which students are required to answer a document-based essay question (DBQ) in forty-five minutes, and Part B, in which students are asked to answer two thematic questions in seventy minutes. Students choose one question from each of two groups of three questions; you are advised to spend five minutes planning and thirty minutes writing each of your thematic essays.
Within the free response section, the forty-five-minute DBQ essay will be weighted 45 percent, and the two thematic essay together will be weighted 55 percent. For the total examination score, the multiple choice and the free-response sections will be weighted equally. In other words, the break-down is as follows:
Section I Multiple Choice = 50% Section II DBQ = 22.5% Section II-A = 13.75% Section II-B = 13.75%
Other Schools
After you pass your exam, you'll want to know where take can take your credits. Click here for a complete listing of all University of Wisconsin System schools and the scores they will accept. Click here for all other colleges.