Noooooo. Now I’m praying for at least a 4. My hopes of a 5 are nearly ruined
Wanted a 5 walking out of the test, now just hoping for a 4 after seeing these distributions.
OMG OMG OMG. THAT MEANS MY LATE EXAM IS IN THAT SCORE DISTRIBUTION OMG OMG OMG
I still stand by my opinion that college board is to blame in part for those scores. We were thrown to the savages with little idea how to answer things. Or course, the students have a responsibility too, but still.
After seeing those scores… lol… i sent my scores to UF, when they receive my application next year will they see my score (probably got 2/3) or will they only see if I apply for credit there? Will it impact my admissions chances?
@overworried I want to say no. Physics is hard and they will probably be happy you challenged yourself.
I am having the same fears. I mean a 63% fail rate is ridiculous, and I sent my scores. I plan on putting on the application the reason my score wasn’t good if I fail. Because that doesn’t reflect me and my ability to succeed in college. It reflects being shafted by a testing agency and having a teacher who did not prepare us well along with no good prep books.
Don’t do that!!! AP scores carry little to no weight in the admissions process, and there is literally no way that you, or anyone, can spin this in an application that will not come across as whiny.
@skieurope Ah. I understand. Yeah I was worried about that. I just am scared if I make a 1 they will be like “He can’t handle college work” and give me the red x even if my other scores are good. I am applying to a Tech school.
I will just try to go with it (follow your advice and not put anything) and hopefully they will see when they see my other AP scores that something was obviously off.
Kids at our school had grade problems in the Physics 1 class because the school took the College Board at their word that this would be a good first class in physics. The school offered it to a bunch of freshmen who were in honors math. The thing they forgot is that they had also changed the math sequence from Alg1|Geom|Alg2 to Integrated Math and slowed the math sequence down for Common Core, so the kids taking Physics 1 as freshman had never seen sine and cosine, so couldn’t do vectors. Previously, the high math kids got those basic parts of trig (not identities) in 8th grade, and so some of them were fine in AP Physics B in 9th grade. This year, smart kids ended up with Cs – a big GPA hole to dig their way out of.
@skieurope what about the ivy leagues and schools like Caltech? Will it hurt you at all if you get a 3 or 4 on an AP rather than a 5?
@kgsoccer08 No
In addition I think most schools who would even care wouldn’t hold the same weight to AP Physics 1 right now. I mean if 63% failed for the first testing, you can’t help you were the first to ever take it. It should be commended. Imagine other AP courses like Calculus if there were no sample free responses. So either way we should be proud pass or fail for being the first group.
ugh my luck.
FIRST TO TAKE AP BIO
FIRST TO TAKE AP CHEM
FIRST TO TAKE APUSH AND AP PHYSICS
SENIOR YEAR: FIRST TO TAKE AP ART HISTORY
Trevor said that over twice as many students took Physics 1 than Physics B. That means like 180,000+ people approximately. I’m sure ** a lot** of people were pushed in to this course without being ready for it b/c it’s advertised as a first year physics course for anyone. The average FRQ score was only 28%, so clearly most of these people were not ready to take the exam. That’s why there is no need to worry about the horrid distributions for AP Physics 1 since it’s because of other unprepared students. Pretty much everyone on College Confidential should be fine.
It will be interesting when they release the data this fall to see the 9th/10th/11th/12th distribution for this test.
@AlphaDragon You are correct. In fact they told many schools to get rid of their honors Physics programs because AP Physics would be better. But it is very clear that there is still a place for honors. AP Physics was very challenging for those who are willing to take the time. Not everyone down the street like APUSH which still has students in it at the unproper level.
The thing is especially kids who want to get into a decent school by taking honors courses in science, they are forced to take AP at many schools because it isn’t offered. Then at some schools, like mine there are some students who already took physics so they got some concepts but they still didn’t know everything for AP.
Even though there are probably kids in the score distribution who probably shouldn’t have taken AP Physics, I still feel like the College Board could have done a better job informing us about the actual test. Prior to the test date, many students did not have access to any practice multiple choice questions or FRQs — only a few teachers got a practice test from the College Board, but that was it. The sample multiple choice questions in the course guidelines were nowhere close to the actual multiple choice questions on the test. Even the prep books had no idea what was going to be on the exam; the Princeton Review book, the one I used to review for the test, pretty much just copied the first half of its Physics B book from the previous year. Even my physics teacher, who is rather knowledgeable on the subject, did not know what the test was going to be like. This, on top of the many students who were not ready to take a class as advanced as AP Physics, probably led to the dismal scores of this first testing.
In all honesty though… a 4.1% 5 rate? That’s lower than Stanford’s acceptance rate of 5.1%. Even the disastrous 5.5% 5 rate for the 2013 AP Biology redesign did not surpass that… 8-|
Now that I think about it, this exam probably has pretty lenient cutoffs. The average score was around 2.25 and the average FRQ score was like 27.8% . If a 2.25 corresponds to 28%, then a 3 must be like 35-40% assuming a similar score on the multiple choice. A 4 should also be around 50-55%. So getting half of the test right would be a very good chance at a 4 and at the very very least a 3. This is just my guesstimate though.
Yeah @azwu331 there was pretty much no way of preparing well for this exam. No practice, no good review books, no teachers teaching what was on the test. You kind of just had to be good at this kind of new exam in the first place (not that I was though).
That’s why I sort of envy the students who will take this later since they will have better resources and not just walk in blindfolded.
@overworried UF doesn’t consider AP test scores as part of admissions. Don’t worry about it. 