<p>Good evening, everybody. My physics B teacher received an email from the College Board around lunchtime today detailing a new and sudden change to the exam. This may or may not be critical to you, depending on how you go about answering FRQs. I am not sure if this applies to physics C; I am only reporting what my physics B teacher announced.</p>
<p>Starting this year, students are specifically instructed not to include the x- and y-components of a force on a designated free-body diagram. Do not break your force vectors up into components if there is a specific spot on the FRQ for you to draw your forces. An example is found on problem</a> 1 of the 2007 FRQ. Students will lose one point for every vector component drawn on the designated free-body spot (obviously you cannot earn negative points on an FRQ, though). To use the 2007 FRQ as an example, you would NOT break your normal force or kinetic frictional force into x- and y-components on there. Instead, you will simply draw the two forces as resultants.</p>
<p>If a student wishes to break his vectors down into components, he may do so off to the side. However, to repeat, any components drawn on an official FBD spot on the FRQ will lose points.</p>
<p>Additionally, if you are instructed to draw a free-body in part (a), but another hypothetical force is added in part (d), be sure not to draw that force on the FBD in part (a). The College Board is supposed to give this as a reminder on their FRQs.</p>
<p>Chances are that most of you weren't planning on breaking down your forces into components on there anyway. Apparently, there was no set way in previous years to deal with students who broke their forces into components. According to my teacher, starting this year, you will lose points for these aberrant vectors.</p>
<p>Again, this is what I heard from my teacher, and my teacher said that this was just released. If this is old news, I apologize for wasting space and time.</p>
I still found out earlier than that.</p>