How to use an AP Psychology practice test

What this exam actually asks of you

The AP Psychology multiple-choice section is 75 questions in 90 minutes and carries 66.7% of your final grade. The rest is two free-response questions in 70 minutes, an article analysis and an evidence-based question, which a computer cannot mark. A practice sitting covers the half that can be marked exactly.

The mistake that ruins the result

Revising by rereading the textbook and recognizing terms. The exam asks you to tell two similar terms apart under time pressure, and recognition is not that.

How to sit it

All 75 questions in one 90-minute block, no pauses. The real exam hands you the whole clock and lets you spend it, so a practice run broken into units removes the only decision the section actually asks you to make.

What to do the day after

Sort your errors into 'did not know it' and 'knew it, picked the neighbor'. The second pile is the one that moves, and on this exam it is usually the bigger one.

What a practice test owes you

An AP grade is a 1 to 5 cut from a composite whose boundaries move every year, so a practice percentage on AP Psychology converts to nothing. What converts is knowing which questions you got wrong and why.

Our AP bank holds 544 questions and 1,632 wrong answers, and every one of those wrong answers carries its own sentence saying what a student who picked it was probably thinking. Not one is left bare, and a build of our site fails if that stops being true. For AP Psychology that matters because the wrong options are written to be the answer a student gives when they have half the idea, which is not something a score can tell you.

We also measure whether the paper can be beaten without being read. On our AP exams the best any length-based strategy scores is 38%, against the 25% that pure guessing gives. A practice test where picking the longest option beats guessing is measuring the person who wrote it, not your child.

Two thirds of your grade is decided in these 75 questions, more than on any other AP we publish, so a practice sitting here is worth more than it looks.

Where to sit one

We publish two AP Psychology forms with no questions shared between them, so a second sitting measures what you learned rather than what you remembered. A free sample is on the samples page, and it needs no account.

More on this exam: the full AP Psychology guide, what is on it, pacing the section.

Common questions

How long should a AP Psychology practice test take?

75 questions in 90 minutes for the multiple-choice section, which is 66.7% of the grade. The free-response half is separate and needs a human reader.

Should a AP Psychology practice test be timed?

Yes, the full 90 minutes in one block. The real exam hands you the whole clock and lets you decide how to spend it, and that decision is most of the difficulty.

Is the score the useful part of a AP Psychology practice test?

No, the reasons are. Every one of the 1,632 wrong answers in our AP bank carries a sentence saying what a student who picked it was probably thinking, and for AP Psychology that is what turns a list of misses into a plan.

How often should we sit a AP Psychology practice test?

Twice: once early enough that there is time to fix what it shows, and once close enough to May to check that you did.