Category Archives: AP exam prep

First (Annual?) AP Calculus AB Boot Camp

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As teachers, we all do our best to reach our students and
help them to master the material in our courses. In an AP course, we have the
added challenge of an outside source judging whether our students mastered the
material or not. Every year I try to think of better ways to prepare my
students for the AP exam. A few years ago I started the “AP Review Binder”
which helps the students keep their practice materials organized while they
study for the exam. Last year I started using a subset of questions from an
actual AP exam as their final exam to help see how ready the students are. Both
of these ideas have been effective in helping to prepare my students but this
year I knew I needed something more.

I teach two all-girls AP Calculus AB courses—one in third
period and one in sixth period. The classes are not balanced and I wound up
with 12 students in 3rd period and 31 in 6th period. For
a variety of reasons my 6th period class has been a challenge. Not
only is it a large class at the end of the day, but there are several students
who either barely met the prerequisite for the class or had petitioned to have
the prerequisite waived. Overall, my 6th period class is weaker than
my classes from prior years and I am concerned with how they will do on the AP
exam.
With this in mind, I decided to offer an AP Calculus Boot
Camp to my students during this past weekend. I first surveyed the class to see
if they would even be interested in coming in to do this. The response was overwhelmingly
positive. I surveyed them again this past week to find out when they would be
willing to come. I offered 4 different 2 hour time slots to pick from—three on Saturday and
one on Sunday. Based on their responses, I chose Saturday 9-11 am and Saturday
4-6 pm as our two sessions. After checking with the facilities department to
make sure the school would be open on Saturday, I let the students know that we
were good to go!
Since several students indicated that they wanted to come to
both sessions, I needed to come up with a different plan for each session. Using
materials that I received when I attended an AP Calculus workshop a few years
ago, I made a packet of about 15 multiple choice questions and a different
packet of 6 free response questions. I had these ready to give to the students
when they arrived for the first session. I decided that we would work on one
FRQ at a time. I would give the students about 5 minutes to read the question
and develop a plan for how they would answer all the different parts. If they
finished their plan before time was up, they could start answering the
question. When time was up, I would project the problem and we would work
through it together. Using the grading rubric, I could break down the score
they would have received on the problem and could help them understand exactly
how much work they would need to show to get full credit.
While 13 students said they would come for the first
session, I really didn’t know if anyone would actually come at all. I was very
pleased that 12 students arrived at 9 am ready to work. I gave them the two
packets and we started going over the FRQs. The process of going over one question
at a time went really well. We had really great discussions and as we
progressed through the problems, I could see the girls’ confidence grow. We
actually went 15 minutes over so that we could finish the last problem! The
group was so focused on the FRQs that we didn’t have time to do the multiple
choice questions. I told them that if they were coming back in the afternoon,
they could work on them at home and I would go over them when they got back. 

Morning session

I created a second packet of FRQs for the afternoon session.
Again, I wasn’t sure how many girls would actually come and I was pleasantly
surprised when 12 girls came in for the second session. Five girls returned and
seven new girls came in. I gave the new girls all of the material that I had
handed out in the morning and then everyone got the new FRQ packet. We started
out by quickly going through the multiple choice questions and then returned to
our method of going over the FRQs one at a time. Again, we were so focused on
finishing the last problem that we went over by about 10 minutes.

Afternoon session

I am really glad that I tried this out and will probably do
this again next year. I think it did a lot to help the students as they were
doing their last minute preparation for the exam. I wish that some
of the students who I am most worried about passing the exam would have come
in, but at the same time it was wonderful to be working with students who truly wanted to be there. Even though I came in on a weekend, it barely felt like work at all!

Using Final Exams to Predict AP Exam Results

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Trying to keep AP students on track to do well on the AP exam
can be a daunting task. In the six years that I have been teaching AP Calculus,
I am constantly trying to figure out the optimum amount of guidance versus
independence to use with the students. Some students will do well no matter how
much I push them in class to prepare but others will, for whatever reason,
choose to minimize preparing for their AP Calculus exam so they can focus on
other things. One thing I chose to do differently this year was the 2nd
semester final exam.

AP Calculus students like to try to convince me to not give
them a final exam for the 2nd semester because they feel so busy
preparing for all of their AP exams. One year, I gave in and did not have a 2nd
semester final. However, when that year produced the highest percentage of
scores of “1” earned by my students on the AP exam, I recognized that there was
a correlation to the final exam and preparation for the AP exam. My first change
was to schedule the final exam to coincide with the last block period before AP
testing began. This helped somewhat. My most recent change was to the format of
the final exam itself. My 2nd semester Calculus final exam had not
been cumulative and was also completely multiple choice. This year, though, I
completely revamped my final exam to be cumulative for the entire course and I
based it on an actual unpublished AP exam. In order to get student buy-in I had
to promise to curve the final exam just like they do the actual AP test. I used
the scoring rubrics assigned by the College Board for the FRQ’s and used the
College Board’s point spreads to assign scores from 5 to 1 for each of my
students. I then crunched the data and correlated the scores to percentages to
enter into Powerschool as the final exam grade.
When the AP scores were published in July, I was anxious to
see how well I predicted the students’ scores. In over half of my students
(54%), the final exam score predicted the actual AP score. 31% scored one point
lower than predicted, 13% scored one point higher than predicted and only 1
student scored 2 points lower than predicted by the final exam. I am pleased
with my accuracy but at the same time I wonder why I was still wrong about
almost half of them. Here are my thoughts:
  1.  I only gave them the “Calculator allowed” questions in order to keep the length of test appropriate to the amount of time in a block period. Some students are better at answering questions using their calculator than they are when they don’t have access to one.
  2. Maybe I didn’t adhere to the grading rubric for the FRQ as stringently as I ought to have done.
  3. Maybe learning their “predicted” score had a psychological effect on how the students continued to prepare for the exam.

1.      I am now trying to explore the possible meanings of my 3rd
point. I think that there were a handful of students who were predicted to not
pass with a score of 2 who then took the attitude of “I’m so close. Maybe if I
work a little harder I can get a passing grade on the AP exam” and were then
able to improve their score. I also wonder though if some of the students who were
predicted a 3 on the exam then became overconfident and felt that they had
already prepared enough and then ultimately failed to pass the AP exam. This
year I plan to use the same exam format and will be extra careful on how I
grade the FRQ’s. Most importantly, though, I plan to very carefully help frame
their predicted outcome to motivate the students who need a little more work to
pass the exam and to warn other students of the dangers of complacency,
particularly if they barely earned a 3 on their final exam.