From the first unit, a little at a time. AP exams are cumulative and held in May, so a course taught from September covers months of material. Reviewing each unit as you finish it, then revisiting older units on a spaced schedule, is far more effective than trying to relearn the whole course in April. Research on distributed practice finds that spreading study over time produces better long-term retention than massing the same hours together (Cepeda et al., 2006).

A practical routine: after each class, turn the day’s notes or handout into flashcards, and spend 10–15 minutes a day on the cards that are due. By spring, most of your review is already built.

Flashcards are strong for the recall-heavy parts of AP courses: vocabulary and processes in AP Biology, terms and studies in AP Psychology, and people, events, and dates in AP U.S. History. They are weaker for the skills-based parts of the exams, such as free-response writing and document-based questions, which need practice with real prompts. Use flashcards to make the content automatic, and official College Board practice questions to build the writing and analysis skills.

Re-reading feels productive but mostly builds familiarity, not recall. A landmark review of ten common study techniques rated only two as “high utility”: practice testing and distributed (spaced) practice, while re-reading and highlighting were rated low utility (Dunlosky et al., 2013). In a classic experiment, students who took a recall test on a passage remembered more of it a week later than students who spent the same time re-studying it, even though the re-studiers felt more confident right after (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).

That is why NoteTube turns each lecture into flashcards scheduled with the SM-2 spaced-repetition algorithm and quizzes you can retake. Instead of re-reading a transcript the night before the exam, you answer questions drawn from the lecture across several days, which is the review pattern the research favors.