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United States History Course Requirements
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The AP Program unequivocally supports the principle that each individual school must develop its own curriculum for courses labeled "AP." Rather than mandating any one curriculum for AP courses, the AP Course Audit instead provides each AP teacher with a set of expectations that college and secondary school faculty nationwide have established for college-level courses. AP teachers are encouraged to develop or maintain their own curriculum that either includes or exceeds each of these expectations; such courses will be authorized to use the "AP" designation. Credit for the success of AP courses belongs to the individual schools and teachers that create powerful, locally designed AP curricula.
The AP U.S. History course should be designed by your school to provide students with a learning experience equivalent to that of an introductory college course sequence in United States history. Your course should provide students with the analytic skills and factual knowledge necessary to deal critically with the topics and materials in U.S. history.
There are no specific curricular prerequisites for students taking AP U.S. History.
All students who are willing to accept the challenge of a rigorous academic curriculum should be considered for admission to AP courses. The College Board encourages the elimination of barriers that restrict access to AP courses for students from ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in the AP Program. Schools should make every effort to ensure that their AP classes reflect the diversity of their student population.
High schools offering this exam must provide the exam administration resources as described in the AP Coordinator's Manual.
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AP United States History Curriculum Alignment
The AP Program has embarked on an ambitious effort to align the AP United States History course and exam with introductory college courses that research identifies as best facilitating deep learning. The AP Program is concerned that the amount of content included on the AP United States History Exam is putting inappropriate pressure on teachers to sacrifice depth of study to breadth of coverage. We anticipate that changes will be announced in 2007 but not implemented until, at earliest, the May 2010 AP United States History Exam, providing several years for raising awareness and building an understanding of these changes before they are implemented.
In the meantime, teachers are encouraged to review the scoring formula for the most recent AP United States History Released Exam, which shows the relative weight assigned to the different types of questions and the actual number of questions that need to be answered correctly to earn an AP Exam grade of 3, 4, or 5. Increased awareness of the relatively insignificant weight assigned to any one question may relieve some of the pressure teachers feel to cover every topic that could be assessed on the exam, and may help teachers see the amount of flexibility the current exam provides them to reduce content coverage. The current AP Exam is deliberately designed to be more broad than any one college (or AP) United States history course so that it can measure a variety of different schools' selection of United States history content. Accordingly, the exam assigns minimal weight to each individual question, so that students whose teachers choose to provide them with a deeper exploration of some topics over others will not be disadvantaged on the AP Exam. So long as the "Curricular Requirements" listed below are fulfilled, teachers should use their own discretion when determining the amount of content to include in an AP course, and can be selective without jeopardizing a student's likelihood of earning a high AP Exam grade.
 2001 AP U.S. History Released Exam Scoring Formula (.pdf/47KB)
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Requirements
To request authorization to label a course "AP," complete the following two steps:
- Complete and submit an AP Course Audit form, on which the teacher and principal attest that their course includes or exceeds the following curricular requirements delineated by college and university faculty.
- Submit an electronic copy of the course syllabus that demonstrates inclusion or improvement on the curricular requirements (see Syllabus Preparation Guidelines). If your course does not include one or more of the curricular requirements but merits designation as a college-level course, see Instructions for Submitting Materials for the process for describing alternate approaches to the course.
Syllabus Preparation Guidelines
Instructions for Teachers
Instructions on how to submit AP Course Audit materials via the Web will be posted on AP Central and mailed to principals in January 2007.
Curricular Requirements
- The teacher has read the most recent AP United States History Course Description, available as a free download on the AP United States History Course Home Page.
AP United States History Course Home Page
- The course includes the study of political institutions, social and cultural developments, diplomacy, and economic trends in U.S. history.
- The course uses themes and/or topics such as those listed in the Course Description, selected at the teacher's discretion, as broad parameters for structuring the course. The themes are designed to encourage students to think conceptually about the American past and to focus on historical change over time. The topic outline is suggested as a general guide for AP teachers in structuring their courses; it is not intended to be prescriptive of what teachers must teach.
- The course teaches students to analyze evidence and interpretations presented in historical scholarship.
- The course includes extensive instruction in analysis and interpretation of a wide variety of primary sources, such as documentary material, maps, statistical tables, works of art, and pictorial and graphic materials.
- The course provides students with frequent practice in writing analytical and interpretive essays such as document-based questions (DBQ) and thematic essays (see the Course Description for more information).
Resource Requirements
- The school ensures that each student has a college-level U.S. history textbook (supplemented when necessary to meet the curricular requirements) for individual use inside and outside of the classroom.
- The school ensures that each student has copies of primary sources and other instructional materials used in the course for individual use inside and outside of the classroom.
- The school ensures that each student has access to support materials for the AP U.S. History course, including scholarly, college-level works that correspond with course topics; writings by major American authors; as well as standard reference works such as encyclopedias, atlases, collections of historical documents, and statistical compendiums, either in a school or public library or via the Internet.
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