FRQs

This guide organizes advice from past students who got 4s and 5s on their exams. ✨ We hope it gives you some new ideas and tools for your study sessions. But remember, everyone's different—what works for one student might not work for you. If you've got a study method that's doing the trick, stick with it. Think of this as extra help, not a must-do overhaul.

📌 Overview

• Students are given 2 free response questions about explaining behavior through theoretical frameworks and analyzing the results of psychological research studies
• 33% of Exam Score
• Spend 25 minutes per question

💭 General Advice

Tips on mindset, strategy, structure, time management, and any other high level things to know

• At beginning of the year, start looking at FRQs to see what the format is like and how you’ll use the information you know to answer the prompt.
• Start studying early (around spring break). Remember that writing things down and using active recall are some of the best strategies for studying!
• Use your resources to help gauge your strengths and weaknesses. You can take a lot of practice tests focusing on the topics you struggle a lot in, making sure to review the information and understand it.
• When taking practice exams, don’t just take them nonchalantly. Especially for FRQs, you might want to take the first one timed to see how it’s like and then the second one untimed to see if you know the terms and questions asked. As mentioned earlier, studying early is always a good idea because you’ll be able to see your score and responses improve as time goes on. Pace yourself and you’ll see your accuracy improve.
• Don’t spend hours at a time studying because you’ll wear yourself out. Schedule times throughout the day/week to study. If you’re stuck on studying and are getting frustrated with your progress, it’s ok to take a mental break! Take a walk outside, eat a snack, listen to music, or do something that makes your mental state calmer.
• A lot of terms are often left out of your class, so if you see something you don’t know, don’t stress! Just use what you know and guess, it’s easy to eliminate answers based on what you do know. Also, Freudian theories and problems are incredibly easy to answer.
• Alternatively you can study different versions of a term and different ways it can be phrased. Most of the time, you’ve learned the concept, you just might not know what is being asked of you.
• Be sure to study your terms as most of this class and exam are memorization, the more vocab you know, the better you can understand the questions and what they are asking you for. Underline parts of the questions that indicate what they are asking for.

🙋🏽 Help with Structuring FRQ Responses

• Annotate - Circle key words in the instructions
• Space - Leave 2 spaces between your points. (Each point will be a little paragraph).
• Order - Answer the points in order - leave a space to come back if you needed.
• Define - State and briefly explain the term to demonstrate understanding using psychological terminology whenever possible. Underline key psych vocabulary terms.
• Application - Relate the term to the scenario paying specific attention to the instruction you annotated.

🕐 Before you Write

What should a student do in the first few minutes, before they start answering?

• Read through the entire question and mark all the terms that you know! If you don’t know something, star it and come back to it later. As long as you label every part in your FRQ or write it in order, you should be fine to leave space for an answer or jump around.
• Underline the part of the prompt that you think will correspond with each of the terms and mark it down. This makes it easier for you to organize your response, allowing you to find exact examples.

✏️ Writing the FRQ

• Use this common AP mnemonic—define, explain, connect (DECK the FRQ). First, define whatever term they’re asking you to explain and apply. Then, explain more about what that term means and how it is used. Then, apply/connect it to the given scenario.
• You can also try using the SODA method: spacing the responses out, ordering the questions as you see them, defining the term in your answer, and applying it to the question. This helps graders grade and to ensure you get a point through an example even if your definition was off.
• If you’re unsure of certain terms/questions, throw your best guess out there because it never hurts your score if you are wrong, but it can only improve your score if your answer is right!
• For some of the past exams, the graders have given points to answers that follow a train of thought. Though they have to follow the idea of the prompt and key terms. So you can’t talk about Piaget when the question is asking about the spotlight effect but you can use the scenario provided to help with your definition. There is a bit more leeway for AP Psych FRQs than other exams, so it’s never really an all-or-nothing situation unless you genuinely do not know what a word means.
• For questions where you have absolutely no clue as to what the answer might be, break down the terms that are used. Don’t know what a “double-blind” procedure is? Break down the term: if “blind” would mean unable to see in the experiment, “double-blind” would mean both the experimenter(s) and participants don’t know which group of the experiment they’ve been assigned to.
• When studying for the FRQ portion of the exam, make sure to memorize key words relating to psych concepts to use on the FRQ. When grading FRQ’s, they look for very specific words in your response that may score you a point.
• Get straight to the point. For the AP Psych FRQs, you are not given much time. Because of this, it’s important that you get straight to the point. Overly flowery language can cost you time you should be spending on answering the next question. The AP graders are going to be scanning your answers for key words and explanations. The less “wordy” your responses are, the better.
• You CAN add details to the prompt as long as they don’t contradict anything said in the prompt to write your response. The prompt may not perfectly fit with the term so you can add details that do NOT contradict the prompt.

🤔 Relating Theories to Scenarios

• It’s important to have already studied different examples of each theory that you’ve learned in class. When studying for the AP exam, have a recurring scenario that you could adapt each theory to so that you understand exactly how it exists in real life.
• Take the root of the theory and try to apply it to the scenario, so you can adapt the theory into the prompt.
• Think of the scenario as if it is happening in your life and you are working to identify it to find a solution. If you change names to people you know the scenario may seem less foreign and may kickstart your memory in remembering what you learned.

🤓 The Parts of a Research Study

• When answering a research design question, underline all the terms that explicitly or implicitly state the use of a research study tactic. Then ask yourself “what’s missing?”, or “what does this fall into?”, or “What's wrong about this?” For example, a research study may talk about debriefing the participants (which falls into the ethical principles of the APA) but may not have stated the use of informed consent/stated the opposite.
• Underline independent variable, dependent variable and be ready to operationally define them.
• Think of biases that may occur in an experiment or any study.
• P-value measures if it is statistically significant; .05 or less is, more than that is not.
• Focus on Unit 1 to be able to have the tools to answer this FRQ.
• Be careful to read all information on a graph (the key, x and y values, etc.).

💯 How the FRQs Are Graded

• Grammar and spelling doesn’t really matter as long as your readers can understand it! Make sure that you have all components of DECK—define the given term, explain further, and connect it to the scenario. Each term is worth a point (and no half credit is awarded), so this is a foolproof method to get that point!
• Remember, this isn’t an English essay, so don’t freak out! Just write your answer straightforwardly, as long as you understand what you’re saying (even if it’s a guess!) so the graders will know what you’re saying.
• Obviously, it needs to be correct, but your answer needs to show a higher level of understanding.