Max Lu is a geography professor at Kansas State University but has had the privilege of serving AP Human Geography in several capacities. A chance encounter with an AP teacher and reader led him to his first AP Human Geography reading in Clemson, South Carolina in 2003, the third year of the course. Since then, he has read the exam every year except for one and has been a reader, table leader, and question leader. He served on the AP Human Geography test development committee from 2007 to 2015 helping to put the annual AP exam together and continues to serve as a senior reviewer for the College Board. He has also co-authored (with Barbara Hildebrant, Ken Keller, and Rod Neumann) a textbook titled Human Geography for the AP Course (Bedford, Freeman & Worth, 2021). It has truly been a fun and rewarding experience for him to meet and work with AP teachers from around the country at the readings and at the AP Human Geography workshops and summer institutes he has been teaching. Max looks forward to working with you at this APSI in July 2025.

MAX LU

You can reach Max at: ​[email protected]
COURSE DESCRIPTION
My overriding goal is to make the APSI a practical and teacher-centered event by covering the key features in the current Course and Exam Description (CED), sharing resources for teaching the content, and providing a forum for participants to share ideas and teaching strategies.  Major topics to be covered may include

I. The course and the exam
  • The key features of the CED, including the 3 Big Ideas, 5 skill categories, the 7 content units and their 68 topics. The skills and content topics form the foundations of the annual APHG exam.
  • The exam format: the 5 task verbs, tips for answering 7-part FRQs, how to write your own FRQs, etc.
  • The AP Classroom resources such as daily videos, personal progress checks, question banks, etc.
  • Tips for preparing syllabi for the course auditing.

II. Unit-specific resources and activities
  • We will spend the bulk of our time to share a wide variety of teacher-developed, classroom-tested resources and activities for teaching content topics in each of the seven units.  A workbook (pdf file) with detailed descriptions of the resources and activities will be provided.

III. AP exam preparation
  • How to better prepare students for the exam?
  • The FRQ scoring process and how it can inform us about preparing students for the exam. 
  • We will practice scoring sample student response​​