The prospect of taking AP Macroeconomics during junior or senior year of high school is the cause of a lot of apprehension amongst high school students. Even if you consider yourself an economics expert, you may also find yourself feeling nervous upon enrolling for this class, simply because AP classes are known for being extremely demanding in terms of the amount of material they cover and the depth at which they cover that material. When looking ahead to having to learn everything taught in AP Macroeconomics, you may find yourself wondering how this information is organized, and what you should focus on in order to adequately prepare yourself for the AP exam, not just in the weeks before it, but throughout your class experience. This guide will provide an overview of the general outline of topics taught in AP Macroeconomics, discuss the structure and content of the AP Macroeconomics exam, and introduce some great free online resources you can use to ensure that you don’t fall behind in AP Macroeconomics. Armed with this knowledge and these resources, you will have no reason to be nervous about facing AP Macroeconomics—you might even find yourself excited to take the class!

Like all AP courses, AP Macroeconomics aims to replicate the experience of an introductory collegiate course for advanced high schoolers who are intellectually prepared for such a demanding course. In the case of AP Macroeconomics, this course is an introductory collegiate macroeconomics course. As opposed to AP Microeconomics, which focuses on economic principles as they influence the decisions of producers and consumers, AP Macroeconomics takes a larger view of economics by examining how economic principles can be applied to the actions of an entire government or the interactions between various nations.

Students who successfully complete an AP Macroeconomics course typically take the AP Macroeconomics exam in order to attempt to demonstrate their knowledge and earn college credit for their efforts. The AP Macroeconomics exam consists of two sections: a multiple-choice section and a free response section. A student’s score on the multiple-choice section does not take into account questions which they answer incorrectly or do not answer at all; it is solely calculated from questions which they get right. So, this means that if you do not know the answer to question on the AP Macroeconomics exam’s multiple-choice section, you should guess, as it can only help your score. The major themes and concepts taught in AP Macroeconomics are tested on the AP Macroeconomics exam’s multiple-choice section in the following ratios:

• Basic Economic Concepts (8–12%)
• Measurement of Economic Performance (12–16%)
• National Income and Price Determination (10–15%)
• Financial Sector (15–20%)
• Stabilization Policies (20–30%)
• Economic Growth (5–10%)
• Open Economy: International Trade and Finance (10–15%)

The free response section of the AP Macroeconomics exam lasts for one hour. Students are given two short free-response questions and one long free-response questions to respond to; the section’s timing is broken up into a ten-minute reading period and a fifty-minute period of composition. It is recommended that students split their composition time equally between the one long and two short free-response questions. If students are prompted to include diagrams or wish to include them in their answers, all of the diagram’s axes must be correctly labeled.

Now that you have a general sense of the topics that AP Macroeconomics expects you to learn, you may be wondering where you can find additional resources to help you make sure that you keep up with the class without accidentally leaving gaps in your AP Macroeconomics knowledge. Varsity Tutors offers some great free AP Macroeconomics resources, including free AP Macroeconomics Practice Tests, that you can use for this purpose, as well as when studying for your AP Macroeconomics exam. Each free AP Macroeconomics Practice Test consists of about a dozen AP Macroeconomics problems; think of each Practice Test as being a little quiz which you can use to test your skills. After completing an AP Macroeconomics Practice Test, you receive detailed statistics about your performance, including how you did in relation to students who answered the same problems and how long it took you to answer each problem. You also get to view full explanations of how to arrive at the correct answer for each question, so if you missed a question, you can figure out where you went wrong and not make the same mistake again later. By using Varsity Tutors’ free AP Macroeconomics Practice Tests and their other free AP Macroeconomics resources, you can study both efficiently and comprehensively and feel totally prepared on test day!