AP Psychology
College Board · 5 units · exam-weighted · high school
AP Psychology: every unit with its share of the exam, as College Board publishes it, with practice questions per unit and a countdown to the exam.
Set up AP Psychology → One set per unit, 5 of them pre-written and answer-checked. Free, no account needed.
Units and exam weighting
Unit 1: Biological Bases of Behavior 15–25% of the exam
Heredity and environment, the nervous system and neurons, neurotransmitters and drugs, the brain, sleep and dreaming, sensation.
3 of 14 questions in this unit, with the worked answer
Identical (monozygotic) twins raised apart show a correlation of .72 for IQ, while fraternal (dizygotic) twins raised together show a correlation of .40. What is the best conclusion?
Answer. Genetic factors contribute substantially to individual differences in intelligence in this population, but environment still plays a meaningful role.
Increasing the intensity of a stimulus on a neuron above its threshold will most likely...
Answer. Increase the rate of firing and recruit more neurons, not change the size of any single action potential.
During a job interview, a student's heart rate increases, pupils dilate, and digestion slows. Which branch of the nervous system is responsible, and what is its general function?
Answer. The sympathetic nervous system; it mobilizes the body's resources for a fight-or-flight response to stress or threat.
What people get wrong
- Treating heritability as a statement about one individual ('this person's IQ is 60% genetic'). Instead, remember heritability is a population statistic describing the proportion of variance in a trait across a group that is due to genetic differences.
- Confusing agonist and antagonist direction under time pressure. Instead, anchor each term to a concrete drug you know cold (e.g., nicotine as an acetylcholine agonist, naloxone as an opioid antagonist) and reason from there.
- Mixing up sympathetic and parasympathetic effects (e.g., saying the parasympathetic system increases heart rate). Instead, memorize them as a pair: sympathetic arouses/mobilizes ('fight or flight'), parasympathetic calms/restores ('rest and digest').
- Assuming REM sleep is the 'deepest' sleep because it is hardest to wake someone from. Instead, remember REM is called paradoxical sleep: brain activity resembles wakefulness and muscles are paralyzed, while NREM stage 3 (slow-wave sleep) is the stage with the slowest, most synchronized brain waves.
Unit 2: Cognition 15–25% of the exam
Perception, thinking and problem solving, memory encoding, storage and retrieval, forgetting, intelligence and testing.
3 of 14 questions in this unit, with the worked answer
A radiologist who has read thousands of X-rays notices a subtle fracture that a novice would miss, because she expects to find abnormalities in certain locations. Which type of processing best explains her perception?
Answer. Top-down processing
A weightlifter can tell the difference between a 10 lb and 11 lb weight, but not between a 100 lb and 101 lb weight. What principle explains this?
Answer. Weber's Law
A quality-control inspector correctly identifies a defective part on the assembly line. In signal detection theory terms, what is this response called?
Answer. A hit
What people get wrong
- Treating recall and recognition as interchangeable — recall requires retrieving information with no cues (fill-in-the-blank), while recognition only requires identifying it among options (multiple choice); always check which the question describes before naming a memory failure.
- Assuming a reliable test must be valid — a bathroom scale that's off by 10 pounds every time is perfectly reliable (consistent) but not valid (accurate); evaluate the two criteria separately.
- Mixing up proactive and retroactive interference — proactive interference is OLD memories disrupting NEW learning, retroactive is NEW memories disrupting OLD ones; a memory trick is 'retro' looks backward, so it reaches back and damages older memories.
- Believing heuristics guarantee a correct or optimal answer — heuristics are fast mental shortcuts that are often right but systematically produce errors (e.g., the representativeness heuristic causing base-rate neglect); don't call a heuristic 'wrong' or 'right,' call it 'fast but bias-prone.'
Unit 3: Development and Learning 15–25% of the exam
Themes and methods of developmental psychology, physical, gender, cognitive and social-emotional development, classical and operant conditioning, social and cognitive learning.
3 of 14 questions in this unit, with the worked answer
A researcher tests memory in 20-, 40-, and 60-year-olds all within the same month rather than following one group over decades. What design is this, and what is its main limitation?
Answer. Cross-sectional design; its main limitation is that differences between age groups may reflect cohort effects (generational differences) rather than true developmental change.
During prenatal development, a mother's heavy alcohol use can cause fetal alcohol syndrome. What general term describes any external agent, like alcohol, that can cause abnormal prenatal development?
Answer. A teratogen.
A 4-year-old watches water poured from a short, wide glass into a tall, narrow glass and insists there is now 'more' water, even though the amount hasn't changed. Which Piagetian stage does this illustrate, and what cognitive limitation is at play?
Answer. Preoperational stage; the child lacks conservation, the understanding that quantity stays the same despite changes in appearance.
What people get wrong
- Treating 'positive' and 'negative' in operant conditioning as 'good' and 'bad.' Instead, remember positive means adding a stimulus and negative means removing one, regardless of whether the outcome is pleasant.
- Confusing classical and operant conditioning in a scenario. Instead, check whether the behavior is an involuntary reflex being paired with a new stimulus (classical) or a voluntary behavior being shaped by consequences that follow it (operant).
- Mixing up variable-ratio and variable-interval schedules. Instead, ask what determines the reward: number of responses (ratio) or elapsed time (interval); remember variable-ratio produces the highest, steadiest response rate and greatest resistance to extinction.
- Assuming Piaget's stage ages are rigid boundaries. Instead, identify the stage by the cognitive ability or limitation shown (e.g., lack of conservation, egocentrism), since exam scenarios test the behavior, not just the age.
Unit 4: Social Psychology and Personality 15–25% of the exam
Attribution and attitudes, social influence and group behaviour, psychodynamic and humanistic theories of personality, trait theories, motivation, emotion.
3 of 13 questions in this unit, with the worked answer
Jamal sees a coworker snap at a client and immediately thinks, 'She's just a rude person.' He never considers that she may have just received bad personal news. What bias is Jamal displaying?
Answer. Fundamental attribution error
After winning a debate, a student says, 'I'm just a naturally persuasive speaker.' After losing the next debate, she says, 'The judges were clearly biased.' What is this pattern called?
Answer. Self-serving bias
A woman believes environmental conservation is important, yet she drives a large truck daily for convenience. To resolve the resulting discomfort, she starts telling herself the truck is necessary for her job and rarely used for anything else. Which concept explains her shifting justification?
Answer. Cognitive dissonance
What people get wrong
- Confusing the fundamental attribution error with actor-observer bias: FAE is specifically about over-crediting disposition when judging others' behavior, while actor-observer bias is the broader pattern of attributing your own behavior to situation but others' identical behavior to disposition. Ask whose behavior is being explained before naming the bias.
- Treating conformity, compliance, and obedience as interchangeable: conformity is adjusting behavior to match a group norm without being asked, compliance is agreeing to a direct request from someone of equal status, and obedience is following a command from a perceived authority figure. Check whether there was a request, who made it, and what power they held.
- Reversing the order of events in emotion theories: James-Lange claims the body reacts before the emotion is felt, Cannon-Bard claims both happen at once, and Schachter-Singer adds that a cognitive label determines which emotion is felt from a given arousal. Re-read the scenario for the sequence of body sensation versus feeling versus interpretation before choosing a theory.
- Grading Big Five traits as inherently good or bad (assuming high extraversion is always better than low): each trait is a neutral continuum describing tendencies, not a value judgment, and both ends have adaptive and maladaptive contexts. Describe a person's position on the dimension rather than ranking it.
Unit 5: Mental and Physical Health 15–25% of the exam
Health psychology and stress, positive psychology, defining and diagnosing psychological disorders, categories of disorders, treatment approaches.
3 of 13 questions in this unit, with the worked answer
During which stage of Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome does the body's resources become depleted, leaving the person increasingly vulnerable to illness?
Answer. The exhaustion stage
Explain the difference between problem-focused and emotion-focused coping, and give one example of each.
Answer. Problem-focused coping directly addresses the stressor to reduce or eliminate it (e.g., making a study schedule to handle exam stress). Emotion-focused coping manages the emotional response to a stressor without changing it directly (e.g., talking to a friend to feel better about a stressful situation).
A student feels excited and energized before giving a class presentation, viewing the pressure as motivating rather than threatening. This is an example of:
Answer. Eustress
What people get wrong
- Treating eustress and distress as the same thing — eustress is stress that is perceived as positive and motivating (e.g., excitement before a competition), while distress is stress perceived as negative and overwhelming; the exam expects you to identify which one a scenario describes.
- Assuming a DSM-5 diagnosis explains why someone has a disorder — the DSM-5 only lists descriptive symptom criteria used for classification; it does not identify causes, so don't cite 'DSM-5 diagnosis' as an explanation in a free-response question.
- Confusing bipolar I and bipolar II disorder — bipolar I requires at least one full manic episode, while bipolar II requires a hypomanic episode plus a major depressive episode; students often assume both require full mania.
- Mixing up positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia — positive symptoms are added, excessive behaviors (hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech), while negative symptoms are diminished or absent normal functions (flat affect, avolition, social withdrawal); memorize 'positive = added on.'
How it works
Choosing this curriculum creates a course in Chalkset with one study set per unit and the exam date set to the start of the next testing window. Readiness is weighted the way the exam is, so a weak unit that carries 18% of the score pulls harder than one that carries 6%. Pre-written units come with worked explanations and an independently checked answer key; the rest are written by the agent when you open them.