In preparing for various competitive exams, including SAT, ACT, AP, or IB Exam, students ask themselves what the distinction is between good and great preparation strategies. After the textbooks and notes, the organizers of the exam provide you with the best preparation tips by giving you past papers and scoring rubrics.
While you may know a great deal about the indicator of success on Advanced Placement (AP) exams, it is often not just the knowledge you’ve acquired in your rehearsal, but also the knowledge of what the examiner requires of you as a response. One of the most powerful methods of honing your AP performance is to use past papers exercised in the discipline and the appropriate rubrics against which the past papers have been marked.
AP exams are largely meritocratic: they reward accuracy, outcome-based reasoning, and outcome-based answers with evidence. This all applies powerfully to other standardized tests and AP subjects, like SATs or ACTs, that use past papers to highlight common patterns and use rubrics to prepare and think like examiners.
By utilizing this method, and using both (a) past indicators of evidence-based answer learning outcomes (like AP exams or prior SAT or ACT exams), will help students prepare smarter, not harder, and build upon practical learning that crosses the developmental and literacy framework aligned across multiple assessments, will create formal exam-ready learning.
Past papers have real exam experience for students, while rubrics demonstrate how the examiner marks your answer. The two combined can make a reasonably respectable system for maximum improvement. Such a system can only do you good if you are properly guided—and The Princeton Review will certainly do the heavy lifting for you.
Here is the 5 Strategies to score well in SAT, ACT, AP, and IB exams.
1. Why Past Papers Are Crucial
Working through past papers is one of the most practical steps in preparing for exams. Past papers provide learners with the opportunity to:
- Familiarize themselves with an exam’s format, style, and timing.
- Analyze common patterns and frequently tested concepts.
- Simulate practice in conditions that closely resemble the real examination experience.
- Explore weak concepts in a realistic setting.
The Princeton Review Advantage: As useful as it is to work through past papers, students need to have some feedback to turn mistakes into future progress. At The Princeton Review, experienced tutors eliminate the guesswork involved in working through completed past papers by walking students through them line by line. Rather than simply circling incorrect answers, they explain why a student makes a mistake, and how to make a different (better) choice next time. This kind of seasoned feedback creates an opportunity for students to transition from passive practice into active learning.
2. The Power of Scoring Rubrics
Scoring rubrics are often underrated, yet they detain a great resource to understand how examiners think. Rubrics outline the following:
- The criteria behind awarding points across each question.
- What separates a basic response from a high-scoring response?
- The significance of showing work in math, citing evidence in essays, or showing reasoning in science.
The Princeton Review Advantage: Tutors are equipped to get students to “think like examiners.” For example, in essay-based questions, many students forfeit points because they don’t structure their answers correctly based on the rubric. The Princeton Review instructors model how to answer a rubric’s rubrics, be it by organizing an AP history essay via thesis + evidence + analysis, or working through SAT math problems step by step so that students can glean all the partial mark opportunities.
3. Combining Past Papers with Rubrics: The Winning Formula
The real magic happens when students use past papers and rubrics concurrently. Working on a paper is practice, but working with the rubric shows what and why marks were lost. Going over the paper and rubric together allows students to:
- Recognize patterns in their mistakes (e.g., always forgetting to include marks in conclusions for essays or always skipping steps in math).
- Identify how they improved or, conversely, became more accountable for their performance over time.
Learn how to “upgrade” a good answer into a perfect one.
The Princeton Review Advantage: Rather than students having to decipher rubrics in isolation, The Princeton Review gives personalized guidance after each test. Tutors call out errors to rubric criteria and provide ways to earn marks. For example, if a student’s AP Biology essay lacked enough examples, the teacher would identify that and model ways to add support for future writing.
4. Simulating Real Test Conditions
Studying at home is valuable, but the reality of testing conditions can’t be replicated. The added pressure of time limitations, pacing, and concentration all affect test-taking performance.
The Princeton Review Advantage: The Princeton Review offers proctored practice tests, which helps to simulate the test-day experience. After taking one of these practice tests, students don’t receive just a score, but also a complete analysis of their performance based on rubric standards. Practicing is about not only endurance, but strategic practice to enhance test-taking ability.
5. Targeted Improvement with Expert Support
The greatest difficulty with self-practice is figuring out what to address. In this way, you can find yourself practicing the same mistakes without realizing it.
The Princeton Review Advantage: With Princeton Review’s focused skill-building sessions, students receive customized drills that overcome similar/larger weaknesses that exist in their rubric-based performance. For example, when students need to work on thesis statements in an AP essay, geometry on the SAT, or time management in ACT Science, the instructors survey student performance in order to develop lesson plans that ensure improvement is targeted and measurable.
Beyond Practice: Building Exam Strategies
While rubrics and past papers illustrate grading for exams effectively, students also need to learn strategies to maximize their performance in a limited time frame.
The Princeton Review Advantage: Tutors share strategies, such as when to guess, how to prioritize which questions to answer, plus the best way to structure the written response, to ensure the written response aligns with the rubric. This means students will practice hard, but also practice smart.
Final Thoughts
Past papers and scoring rubrics are really the holy grail of exam preparation strategies. They illustrate both the exam itself and the examiner’s expectations, but the real power comes from using them properly – with analysis, direction, and purpose.
That’s where The Princeton Review shines. Expert reviewer feedback, review-based rubric analysis, targeted practice drills for areas needing improvement, and a test-like environment mean that every past paper you do isn’t just practice; it’s another step closer to mastery.
If your goal is your best possible score, then past papers + scoring rubrics + Princeton Review guidance is the perfect combination to achieve it all.