<p>On the exam will they tell you to find the area under the curve by a Riemann sum or trapezoids and then make the choices really close together so you cant do a definite integral?</p>
<p>yeah, three ways–left hand, right hand, and trapezoids. I encounter about three of them on the mc and one on the frq last ap exam.</p>
<p>Yes. The theory is that you need to understand what you are fundamentally doing, not just be able to do the magic definite integral algorithm and get an answer.</p>
<p>I find that if they want you to do a Riemann sum or trapezoidal approximation, they usually won’t even give you the function. They’ll usually give you a table of values.</p>