<p>I've always relied on just Princeton Review for AP exams in the past, and I've always had the results I wanted on the exams. My concerns this year are that those were for history classes, where I just had to read through the history review and take practice exam questions to do well on the exam. The rigor of questions didn't differ much from one book to the next, so I just relied on PR. This year, however, I'm taking Calc AB and Stat and I need 4s, so I want to make sure I'm reviewing material that is close to what the exam will have to be sure that I score high enough. I have been reviewing out of PR for both of them, but just recently I took a look through some other books like Barrons and Kaplan and the questions seemed to be more difficult than the ones in PR. Some of the other review books seemed to test on material that PR didn't even focus on at all. </p>
<p>So, my question is, what are the best review books for these tests? I want to only review material that will be closely related to the actually AP test. For people who have taken these exams in the past, which review book matched the MC questions the best? I have access to the Free Response from past years and know what to review to be ready for questions like that, it's just the Multiple Choice for these exams that I am concerned about. Thank you in advance for any and all feedback.</p>
<p>PR is the best for Calculus for confirmation. I used that to get a 5 on Calculus AB. Barron’s on the this forum is considered the best for Statistics.</p>
<p>Did you ever compare PR to Arco for Calculus? (Arco is supposed to be the best)</p>
<p>I think I heard Arco is good from CC too.</p>
<p>@jerry Did you find that the practice questions out of PR were close to the actual exam, or were there some surprises when you took the actual AP exam that PR didn’t stress? Probably not many if you got a 5. And most people seem to think that Barron’s is best for Stat. I’ve looked at it before so I think I’ll use Barron’s.</p>
<p>@santeria I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Arco. I just looked it up on Amazon and they don’t have any current editions. Is it one that they update every year?</p>
<p>Well, PR has a bunch of exercises for you to do. The first part of MC is computational, so you should know how to differentiate and integrate. The second part is conceptual, so I don’t know if PR has helped with that since the second part was actually difficult.</p>
<p>I think I’ll probably be good with PR then. I just need to keep practicing the computational stuff. I’ve been looking through the FRQs from past years and doing them. I should be able to pick up a majority of the points on those. It looks like there are some Free Responses that are there every year, such as area between curves and differential equations, both of which I am good at.</p>
<p>I personally loved Princeton for Calculus. The concepts were simplified and the problems weren’t grueling hard like Barrons. Princeton + College Board FRQs gave me way to a 5.</p>
<p>^Yeah, I noticed that the Barron’s questions seemed unnecessarily difficult. That’s the main problem I’ve been running into with some of these prep books: the questions that go beyond what the AP exam will cover. So it sounds like I’ve been doing the right thing with PR and College Board FRQs. I put in a request for Barron’s Statistics at the library. I checked it out earlier this year and it seemed to be a good resource. I think PR Stat could be a little clearer in explaining some things, particularly some of the calculator work, although most of it is pretty solid.</p>