***AP Physics 1 Thread 2014-2015***

The FRQs are going to destroy me.

On the released test there was a question with boxes that were sliding on an incline plane, in projectile motion, and dropped (like @HeyyeYayYaay said). The one on the incline plane takes the longest, right? Because the velocity in the y-dir is dependent on the angle of the incline plane?

@CardinalCompSci was that the question on the FRQ that had a trial 1 and trial 2?

@HeyyeYayYaay @CardinalCompSci or anyone who took the released test

Did you guys take any practice tests from Barron’s Phys 1/2 or any other review book? If so, how did the CollegeBoard test compare to the practice tests from the review books? Just wondering because my teacher isn’t giving us the test.

Just got home from taking the free response. My friend and I didn’t find it to be very difficult, but you kind of have to “see” things and figure out what law to apply. I can’t describe it. In addition, you HAD to know your stuff. For example, if you didn’t know that the current in a series circuit is the same throughout, or that the voltage in a parallel circuit is the same throughout, there was literally no way that you could get a single point. (This was labeled as one of the long free response questions)

Did anyone else think that the multiple choice was really hard, or was it just me? My teacher this year wasn’t that great and I’m really scared for the test

@magic125 I found the multiple-choice to be much harder than the free response, which happens to be the opposite of what one would expect.

@magic125 @apactstudent were the questions similar to the sample questions released by College Board, both MC and FRQ? Also, were the questions a lot harder than the ones in review books (Barron’s, PR)? Just wondering because I haven’t taken the practice test yet.

@shizpie No, the questions in the barron’s book are MUCH easier than actual AP questions. Most of the questions in that book only require you to use basic formulas (V=IR, net force=ma, 1/2mv^2=mgh) to solve the problems while actual AP problems require a lot more reasoning.

   I agree with @apactstudent with how the FRQs are scored. I think it is a lot harder to score well on the free response than on the multiple choice because the scoring guidelines to answers written in VERY specific ways (e.g +1 point if the amplitude of the student's graph was around 16 joules). For example, the guy sitting next to me was confident about his answer to the paragraph length response and his final answer was right, but he only got like 3 out of 7 points because his answer wasn't like the ideal response the scoring guidelines wanted (his answer talked about frame of reference, but the scoring guidelines only gave points for talking about momentum and energy conservation).

@HeyyeYayYaay Upon first glance, I thought I was going to straight up fail. I got a considerable amount done, and I made sure that all the parts that I did were correct. We took our answers home with us today, and we’re going over them tomorrow. I feel confident about the ones that I actually completed, but some parts were pretty sketchy.

The practice exam is usually harder than the actual AP exam. The FR on the practice exam for AP Chemistry was literally impossible, but the FR on the actual 2014 exam actually wasn’t too bad. Apparently time is the biggest issue on the AP Chem FR, but they added 15 mins this year. The time on physics probably won’t be too much of a problem!

What do we need to know for the Lab FRQ? How do we prepare for it?

@ZucchiniSoup for the lab FRQ , it is useful to know:

  • How to use common lab equipment( photogate, spring scale, balance, etc) when you are writing a design for the experiment

-Be able to construct graphs to which the slope of the graph or the area under the graph is the quantity you are looking for (in the practice exam for this year, you had to construct an F vs x graph and and take the slope of that to find spring constant)

  • Old AP Physics B exams have lab questions that are still useful for AP Physics 1

@ZucchiniSoup I would go over every single type of graph that you’ve seen (velocity-time, force-time, etc.) and determine what the slope and the area under the curve tell you. This can be inferred from the units, which is how I figured out what to do for the lab FRQ. There was another lab FRQ that implicitly stated “Does object x obey Hooke’s law?”

Does anyone know where to find the official College Board practice AP Physics 1 Exam?

^You can’t access the practice exam unless you’re an AP teacher. As a student, the only way to see it is if your teacher gives it to you as an in class/mock exam. Also, no one here can post any of the questions since the post will only get deleted by a moderator.

My teacher apparently only got the FRQ section of the practice exam…he doesn’t have any official MC besides the sample ones in the course description.

This exam is going to be a disaster.

My teacher doesn’t have any practice tests.

How can I get more practice before the AP?

umm…my advice would be to work through all the problems on the online released thing (and make sure you understand them), maybe get a prep book

the multiple choice and frq are both extremely conceptual, so you have to really know what you’re doing to get the points. On the frq, if you answer the paragraph response question wrong or if you don’t know the concept for one of the questions (like the electricity one), i think it would actually be possible to get 0 points. Very little partial credit.

Although there is partial credit, it is very hard to get even if you “kind of know” what you are doing. For the practice exam this year, I don’t think there were alternate solutions. Most of them had only one solution to which the points were aligned to (like the paragraph response and the circuit problem). So if you were not on that ONE right track, you probably had like a 60% chance of getting 0 points or 1 point for the whole problem. There were problems which asked you to draw graphs though, and it was easier to get partial credit on that. Overall, it is more than possible to get 6/7 on one question and get 1/7 on the next even if you studied everything, so it’s definitely MUCH less generous with partial credit than the physics B exam was. That’s why I think that the FRQ is harder than the (already hard) MC.