The Advanced Placement Program (AP) course and examination in United States History are intended for qualified students who wish to complete studies in secondary school equivalent to college introductory courses in U.S. history. The examination presumes at least one academic year of college-level preparation, descriptions of which are set forth in this booklet.

The inclusion of historical source material in the course description and in the examination is not intended as an endorsement by the College Board or Educational Testing Service of the content, ideas, or values expressed in the material. The material has been selected by historians who serve as members of the Development Committee. In their judgment, the material printed here reflects the course of study on which this examination is based and is therefore appropriate to use to measure the skills and knowledge acquired in this course.

The AP program in United States History is designed to provide students with the analytic skills and factual knowledge necessary to deal critically with the problems and materials in United States history. The program pre-pares students for intermediate and advanced college courses by making demands upon them equivalent to those made by full-year introductory college courses. Students should learn to assess historical materials—their relevance to a given interpretive problem, their reliability, and their importance— and to weigh the evidence and interpretations presented in historical scholarship. An AP United States History course should thus develop the skills necessary to arrive at conclusions on the basis of an informed judgment and to present reasons and evidence clearly and persuasively in essay format.

Admission to an AP course should depend upon a student’s commitment to the subject as well as such formal credentials as high aptitude scores or outstanding grade records. Many students lacking outstanding credentials have successfully completed AP courses and obtained college credit or advanced placement through the AP Examination. The U.S. History course is generally offered to eleventh and twelfth graders; about 75 percent of the students who take the examination are eleventh graders.

Introductory United States history courses vary considerably among individual colleges. Most institutions offer a survey course, with extensive chronological coverage and readings on a broad variety of topics in such special fields as economic history, cultural and intellectual history, and social history, in addition to political-constitutional and diplomatic history. Other colleges offer courses that concentrate on selected topics or chronological periods. However, both types of courses are concerned with teaching factual knowledge and critical analytic skills. Since there is no specific college course that an AP course in United States History can duplicate in detailed content and coverage, the aim of an AP course should be to provide the student with a learning experience equivalent to that obtained in most college introductory United States history courses.

Most AP courses are designed to give students a grounding in the subject matter of United States history and in major interpretive questions that derive from the study of selected themes. One common approach is to conduct a survey course in which a textbook, with supplementary readings in the form of documents, essays, or books on special themes, provides substantive and thematic coverage. A second approach is the close examination of a series of problems or topics through reading specialized writings by historians and through supplementary readings. In the latter kind of course, the teacher can devote one segment to a survey by using a concise text or an interpretive history. Whichever approach is used, students need to have access to materials that provide them with an overview of United States history and enable them to establish the context and significance of specialized interpretive problems. Although there is little to be gained by rote memorization of names and dates in an encyclopedic manner, a student must be able to draw upon a reservoir of systematic factual knowledge in order to exercise analytic skills intelligently. Striking a balance between teaching factual knowledge and critical analysis is a demanding but crucial task in the design of a successful AP course in history.

Source: College Board, United States History Course Description, ©2001

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