Advanced Placement

AP Unit Planner Template: Exam Weighting and Pacing by Week

AP courses already come with a College Board-published exam weighting per unit — the planning gap is turning that into your own week-by-week pacing, with your own course's actual skills and practices, not a generic template.

Independently developed by Fresh Start Planner — not affiliated with, endorsed by or approved by any curriculum provider. Full disclaimer below.

What each unit needs

Unit title — matching (or clearly mapped to) the College Board unit sequence.
Exam weighting — the published percentage range for this unit, so your pacing reflects what it's actually worth.
Duration in weeks — your own honest estimate for this class, not a generic pace.
Skills / practices — your own course-specific list (these genuinely vary by subject, so a fixed universal list doesn't hold up across AP courses).
Content — the actual subtopics and vocabulary within the unit.
Learning outcome, assessment, key dates — same as any other subject: what a student should be able to do, how you'll check it, and anything time-sensitive tied to this specific unit.

Weighting your pace, not just your topics

A unit worth 20% of the exam and a unit worth 8% shouldn't necessarily get the same number of weeks by default — matching your time investment to what the exam actually weighs is worth doing deliberately, not by accident of how the syllabus happens to be ordered.

Checking your total against the year

Add up the weeks across every unit you've planned and compare that to the teaching weeks you actually have before the exam — the earlier you catch a mismatch, the more room you have to adjust.

Fresh Start Planner builds this exact structure — exam weighting, duration, your own skills list, and a live check against how many teaching weeks you actually have — across AP, DP, MYP, Cambridge and Edexcel.

See Fresh Start Planner →

Fresh Start Planner is an independently developed planning tool, not affiliated with, endorsed by or approved by the College Board, IB, Cambridge, Edexcel or any curriculum provider. References to these curricula are descriptive only, to indicate compatibility. All trademarks remain the property of their respective owners. This page does not reproduce, replace or distribute any official curriculum documentation.