

On your first pass through the section, answer all the questions that deal with concepts you like and know a lot about. When you get ready to begin the multiple-choice section, keep these two lists in mind. Label one list “Calculus Concepts I Enjoy and Know About” and label the other list “Calculus Concepts That Are Not My Strong Points.” To further refine your two-pass approach before Test Day, draw up two lists of exam topics.

You should realize that the more advanced your pacing system is, the more time you might have at the end of Section I to answer the questions that you find difficult.

Picking out questions with graphs is not an especially critical way to analyze the exam questions, but some students do no more than that. If you wanted to, you could take all the AP Calculus questions and arrange them in a spectrum ranging from “fastest to answer” to “slowest to answer.” For example, questions involving a graph are often much faster to answer, as long as you can interpret the visual data correctly. You can tweak the general idea of the two-pass system and apply it specifically to the AP Calculus exam. The two-pass system, discussed next, should be used here. Because they aren’t connected to each other, there’s no reason you have to answer these questions in sequential order. The stand-alone questions look like a bunch of disconnected calculus questions one after the other and that’s just what they are. Tough questions are scattered between easy and moderately difficult questions. Where this question occurs in the test makes no difference, because there’s no patterned order of difficulty in which questions are presented on the AP Calculus exam.

In this question, you get some information and then you’re expected to answer the question. A stand-alone question covers a specific topic and is not part of a set the question that follows it covers a different topic. In that section, if you don’t know how to work a problem, you have to write down what you do know and hope to earn at least part of the available points.Įvery multiple-choice question on the AP Calculus exam can be described as a “stand-alone” question. Contrast this with Section II of the AP Calculus exam, which accounts for the other 50% of your score. The multiple-choice section consists of two parts: Part A contains 30 multiple-choice questions for which you are not allowed to use your graphing calculator, and Part B contains 15 multiple-choice questions for which you may (and in fact, will most likely need to) use your calculator.Īlthough you might not like multiple-choice questions, there’s no denying the fact that it’s easier to guess on a multiple-choice question than it is to guess the correct answer to an open-ended question. The multiple-choice questions on the AP Calculus exam count for 50% of your total score.
