Uni High Gargoyle Staff Blog

Hot off the College Board servers, for those of you who haven’t blocked the test out of your minds until scores arrive: here’s a PDF of this year’s AP Calculus AB free-response questions, Form A.

And for those of you with the distinction of having taken the Calculus BC exam, your FRQs are also up. (If those questions don’t look familiar, try Form B, linked below.)

There is also a “Form B” (AB - BC) of the free-response questions. I took Form A.

My first thought when flipping through the AB Form B questions was, “these were exactly the kinds of problems I expected to see.” One good example is Question 5. We’ve been doing several previous years’ free-response questions in calculus class over the past few weeks, and very frequently each test included one problem requiring a slope field sketch and separation of variables as part of the answer. So naturally, I expected to have to sketch a slope field and separate variables on the actual test. If I was doing Form B, come Question 5 my expectations would be right. But I wasn’t doing Form B.

On second thought, my initial reaction to Form B may very well have been too naive. I thought that, for some reason or another, Form A was pretty difficult, but maybe I would think that Form B would be just as hard or even more so if I were taking it for real, under the pressure and the time control — even if the problems were more “predictable.” And if that were the case, the attendant multiple-choice questions could have been much more unpredictable and harder, to compensate.

UPDATE: Unofficial submissions of answers are popping up all over the place. AB and BC answers this guy (a teacher, maybe?) posted here seem somewhat familiar. Hey look, I remember putting something like that down for AB Question 3(b). Thumbs up for the Mean Value Theorem.

UPDATE 2: I don’t know:

• Whether or not there were more than two multiple-choice forms.
• Whether or not the two MC forms differed in content, or just the order in which the questions appeared (as someone told me shortly after the test).
• How Form A and Form B were used differently.
• The answers at the above link are for Form A, Form B, or both. (The poster specified “Iteration 1,” suggesting that it’s Form A and that Form B is essentially the make-up test.)

If you know, please post in the comments. Thanks in advance.

— Jason He