Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about United States Government and Politics: AP US Government and Politics — the five units.
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A course with a reading list. Nine foundational documents and fifteen Supreme Court cases are named in the course itself, and the exam expects you to know what each of them argued or held.
Fully digital in Bluebook, 3 hours in total.
The four free-response questions are four different tasks, in a fixed order:
That third one is the reason the required-case list is not optional reading. You cannot compare a case you only know by name.
Not opinions. The course is about how a system works: what the Constitution assigns to whom, how the branches check one another, where a right comes from and how the Court has drawn its edges, how people participate, and what the major ideological positions hold and on what grounds.
The distinction that costs marks is between describing a position and grading it. An answer that says which policy is better has answered a question the exam did not ask. An answer that says what a position claims, on what constitutional or empirical basis, and what follows from it, is what the rubric pays for.
Two questions from each of the five units. One quotes Madison's own sentence from Federalist 10 and asks what he is claiming, rather than asking for a summary of him. One works through the real change in free-speech doctrine from Schenck to Brandenburg, quoting the later opinion, because the two-condition test that replaced "clear and present danger" is the test that governs now. The rest cover federalism and grants, cloture, judicial review, selective incorporation, ideological reasoning, polling, electoral rules and interest groups.
Everything is descriptive. No question asks which policy is better or which party is right; where a doctrine is contested, the disagreement is named and neither side is endorsed. One question is built specifically around that distinction, and its most tempting wrong answer is the one that calls one side's reasoning evidence and the other's ideology. No current officeholder and no election after 2020 appears anywhere.
The Constitution, the Federalist Papers and Supreme Court opinions are in the public domain, and where these materials quote them the words are the real words.
They do not train the four free-response tasks, which are half the exam, and they carry no data graphics, while the quantitative-analysis question is built on one.
