With the goal in mind, we are starting the season to talk about the AP exam!
With the goal in mind, we are starting the season to talk about the AP exam! Episode 9 outlines the exam structure with 60 MCQ in 90 minutes (1:25), and seven FRQ questions in 105 minutes (1:55). The course and exam content is based on the CED (2:50). As resources we recommend the AP Classroom (3:50) as well as our podcast (4:40). The episode also gives you some tips for pacing (5:05) and discusses the materials allowed on exam day (5:57).
Question: True or false - You can earn partial credit on both the multiple choice and FRQ section of the exam (7:18).
Thank you for listening to The APsolute RecAP: Chemistry Edition!
(AP is a registered trademark of the College Board and is not affiliated with The APsolute RecAP. Copyright 2020 - The APsolute RecAP, LLC. All rights reserved.)
Website:
EMAIL:
Follow Us:
Hi and welcome to the APsolute Recap: Chemistry Edition. Today’s episode will recap exam structure and an overview of what to expect on the actual day.
Lets zoom out:
Whenever you learn to play a new board game, you usually start at the end: What is the goal of the game? What is the end point the players have to reach - hopefully to win? Let’s take a similar approach today when talking about AP Chemistry: In today’s episode, we are looking at the exam day in May: What the structure of the exam is and what you can expect on the actual day.
Let’s zoom in:
The AP Chemistry exam is 3 hours and 15 minutes long. It sounds like a long time, it IS a long time, but it will fly by. And, over the course of the school year, you will have learned sooo much - its great that you finally will have the chance to prove what you know! The exam itself has two sections, which each count for 50% of your score, a 90 minutes Multiple Choice section and a 105 minutes free-response section. Let’s take a closer look at what we know about these two sections.
The Multiple Choice section consists of 60 questions. Breaking the time down, you have 90 seconds for each question. This is obviously an average. There might be a question that you can answer within 30 second, and other questions that take you a bit longer. Overall, though, you DO have to hustle a bit. It is a balance, between reading carefully and thinking about the answer, but also moving at a fairly quick pace. It means that 45 minutes into the exam, you should be on question 30 or 31. I will talk a bit more about pacing and test taking tips in a minute.
The free response section of the exam consists of seven questions. There are three long-answer and four short-answer questions. The questions aim to test your knowledge in all six course skills: models and representations, question and method, representing data and phenomena, model analysis, mathematical routines, and argumentation. Usually, within a question, you can expect to see several sub-questions that focus on different units of the AP Chemistry curriculum. In this section, you often have to interpret data, perform calculations, talk about an experiment or experimental procedure as well as make a claim and support your claim. Timing wise, you should plan for about 22 minutes to answer a long-answer FRQ, which is worth 10 points, and about 9 minutes to answer a short-answer FRQ, which is worth 4 points.
This sounds A LOT, I know. So let’s talk a bit about available resources and how to prepare throughout the year. First of all, you can dive a bit deeper into the content and skills you are learning this year using the CED. The CED, or course exam description, is what teachers use to get detailed information about the course. I’m going to let you in on a secret. The information that your teachers have, you can have too. The CED is a PDF document that is released by the College Board and readily available online. I encourage you to download this document. In it, it will have practice questions, layouts of the exam, as well as an overview of all nine units that you will be expected to study. It also gives you a breakdown, in percentages, to which extent the individual units and science practices will be tested - intermolecular forces and properties, Unit 3, for example, makes up 18-22% of the exam, whereas atomic structure makes up 7-9%. Additionally, the CED also has a great overview over the task verbs used in the FRQ questions. It describes what you are expected to do when a question asks you to “describe”, “explain” or “justify”.
One of the great innovations of the last school year and the redevelopment of the college board online platforms was launching of AP classroom. If you are signed up to take the exam in May, you’ve already registered through AP classroom. However, it has many more tools than just to sign up. The AP classroom offers two valuable resources: AP daily videos and practice questions. The daily videos will focus on the content and skills outlined in the CED. The practice questions, called progress checks, which have multiple choice as well as FRQ questions. These progress checks allow you to get instant feedback on how comfortable and how capable, and how ready you are for all of the information coming up for your exam. The purpose of these questions is for practice. They will not count against your grade in class. But this will give you a realistic expectation of what you know and what you don’t. Half of the struggle of preparing for an exam is to figure out what you need to work on. Once you’ve completed your progress checks, you’ll have a better understanding of what you still need to study. That's where the APsolute Recap Chemistry edition comes in.
You can use our podcast to review throughout the year, right before unit tests, but of course, also before the exam. What I would also suggest is to go back on a frequent basis. Why not listen to a quick refresher of a topic from Unit 1 or 2 even if you are already at Unit 4? Going back throughout the year will reduce the content you have to review before the exam in May!
Let’s circle back to the exam day and talk a bit about pacing. How do you get to this pacing of 90 seconds per multiple choice question? Well, practice. It can be really hard to get to a point of answering these questions so quickly. But the more that you practice, the better you will get. It’s kind of like baseball. If you’re stepping up to the plate - you’ve taken some practice swings. And you’ve probably swung a bat that has a weight on the end. When you are practicing to take these multiple choice questions, challenge yourself. Try to complete them at first in two minutes, working your way up to 90 seconds, and then to really challenge yourself in those last few weeks leading up to the exam, work on finishing multiple choice questions at a faster pace than necessary. And, tip: DO NOT leave any Multiple Choice questions blank. IF you are running out of time, just pick your favorite letter and fill in answers for the last few questions you might not have gotten to. A 25% chance of getting it right is MUCH better than a 0% chance.
On the day of the exam, you will be allowed to bring in a watch. But this has to be a traditional, non smartphone style watch. Having a watch on your wrist while you are practicing will allow you to feel more comfortable using this as a pacing guide on the day of the exam. Material-wise, you also will be allowed to bring in a calculator. This calculator can either be a four function, a scientific, or a graphing calculator. You may, however, only use the calculator in the FRQ section. UGH? WHAT? I know this comes a bit as a shock - especially taking into account that the CED tells us that more than a third of the MC questions focus on “mathematical routines”. No worries, though. The math required in the MC section is very basic - it is math that you can easily do in your head! It will take a bit of practice and getting used to. Keep this in mind throughout the year and challenge yourself to NOT use a calculator when practicing official multiple choice questions.
To recap.
The AP Chemistry exam consists of two sections. The first, a multiple choice section, is 90 minutes long and contains 60 questions. The second is free response questions. This section is 105 minutes long and contains 7 questions. Parts 1 and 2 are equally weighted and will both contribute toward your score. Remember, AP exams are scored on a scale of 1-5.
Coming up next on the APsolute RecAP Chemistry Edition: Big Ideas and Science Practices
Today’s question of the day is about exam structure.
True or False - you can earn partial credit on both the multiple choice and FRQ section of the exam.