Advanced Placement (AP) World History: Modern (also known as AP World History, AP World, APWH, or WHAP) is a college-level course and examination offered to high school students in the United States through the

College Board The College Board, styled as CollegeBoard, is an American not-for-profit organization that was formed in December 1899 as the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB) to expand access to higher education. While the College Board is not an asso ...

's Advanced Placement program. AP World History: Modern was designed to help students develop a greater understanding of the evolution of global processes and contacts as well as interactions between different human societies. The course advances understanding through a combination of selective factual knowledge and appropriate analytical skills. Most states require a world history class to graduate.

Course

Students formerly studied all of prehistory and history, reviewing material from 8000 B.C.E. to the present day. In June 2015, the exam was changed to AP World History: Modern. The new exam only includes material from 1200 C.E. onwards. Students first took the new course in the 2019–20 school year. The College Board announced the development of AP World History: Ancient, which focuses exclusively on earlier periods, including prehistory. Students in the United States usually take the course in their

sophomore year In the United States, a sophomore ( or ) is a person in the second year at an educational institution; usually at a secondary school or at the college and university level, but also in other forms of post-secondary educational institutions. In ...

of high school, although they are not generally required to do so, as some take it in

senior Senior (shortened as Sr.) means "the elder" in Latin and is often used as a suffix for the elder of two or more people in the same family with the same given name, usually a parent or grandparent. It may also refer to: * Senior (name), a surname ...

and

freshman A freshman, fresher, first year, or colloquially frosh, is a person in the first year at an educational institution, usually a secondary school or at the college and university level, but also in other forms of post-secondary educational in ...

year. The course is organized around four eras and nine units: *Period 1 – to c. 1450 Unit 1: The Global Tapestry
Unit 2: Networks of Exchange *Period 2 – c. 1450 to c. 1750 Unit 3: Land-Based Empires
Unit 4: Transoceanic Interconnections *Period 3 – c. 1750 to c. 1900 Unit 5:

Revolutions In political science, a revolution (, 'a turn around') is a rapid, fundamental transformation of a society's class, state, ethnic or religious structures. According to sociologist Jack Goldstone, all revolutions contain "a common set of elemen ...

Unit 6: Consequences of

Industrialization Industrialisation (British English, UK) American and British English spelling differences, or industrialization (American English, US) is the period of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an i ...

*Period 4 – c. 1900 to the present Unit 7: Global Conflict
Unit 8:

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

and

Decolonization Decolonization is the undoing of colonialism, the latter being the process whereby Imperialism, imperial nations establish and dominate foreign territories, often overseas. The meanings and applications of the term are disputed. Some scholar ...

Unit 9:

Globalization Globalization is the process of increasing interdependence and integration among the economies, markets, societies, and cultures of different countries worldwide. This is made possible by the reduction of barriers to international trade, th ...

Exam

The first section of the AP World History exam consists of 55 multiple choice questions with a 55-minute time limit. Questions in the multiple choice section are unevenly distributed between the nine units.
In 2011, the College Board removed penalties for incorrect answers and reduced the number of answer choices from five to four per question. The AP World History exam was first administered in 2002. The test underwent a major overhaul for the 2017 exam; however, due to the prodigious number of students that struggled with the free response section, the College Board decided to initiate yet another round of sweeping reform, to be put in effect in May 2018. Currently, it has the same format as

Advanced Placement United States History Advanced Placement (AP) United States History (also known as AP U.S. History, APUSH (), or AP U.S.) is a college-level course and examination offered by College Board as part of the Advanced Placement Program. Course The AP U.S. History course i ...

and

Advanced Placement European History Advanced Placement (AP) European History (also known as AP Euro, APEH, or EHAP), is a course and examination offered by the College Board through the Advanced Placement Program. This course is for high school students who are interested in a firs ...

. The exam features a new section (Section I Part B) that requires three short answer questions, one of which is selected from two options. Each question has three parts, making for a total of 9 parts within the SAQ section. Students have forty minutes to answer these questions, and they count for twenty percent of the exam score. Section II lasts for a total of 100 minutes, and it includes a document-based question (DBQ) and a long essay question (LEQ). Students are allowed to work on either essay within this total time period. The section begins with a 15-minute reading period where students are advised to read both the documents for DBQ. However, students may begin writing during this time; most students take notes on the documents in order to plan out the DBQ. Students are advised to spend 45 minutes writing the DBQ and then 40 writing the LEQ, but there are no rules on when each essay must be worked on. There are three prompts for the LEQ, but only one needs to be chosen. Each LEQ prompt addresses a different period, with one addressing periods 1 and 2, another addressing periods 3 and 4, and a third addressing periods 5 and 6. The DBQ accounts for 25% of the total exam score, and the LEQ is 15%. The essays are graded out of seven points and six points, respectively. Students are required to analyze and synthesize provided documents for the DBQ, but some outside information is still needed. The LEQ only provides a prompt and no sort of stimulus, so a large amount of outside information is necessary.

Grade distribution

In 2012, the head of AP Grading, Trevor Packer, stated that the reason for the low percentages of 5s is that "AP World History is a college-level course, & many sophomores aren't yet writing at that level." 10.44 percent of all seniors who took the exam in 2012 received a 5, while just 6.62 percent of sophomores received a 5.

References

External links

AP World History at CollegeBoard.com

AP World History: Modern Exam Information

AP World History: Course and Exam Description
{{College Board History education in the United States Advanced Placement