#calculus ab

i took ap calculus ab last year and i scored well considering my teacher taught me absolutely nothing so i’m here to share my tips and resources i used !! 

familiarize yourself with the exam. here’s college board’s official overview of the ap calculus ab exam. you need to know the format of the test and what to expect so you’re prepared on test day.

khanacademy is king. khanacademy has a full course on ap calculus ab. i’d recommend watching videos on the sections you find particularly confusing, which is what i did. 

youtube!!! i love youtube so much and used it extremely often during the school year. in particular, patrickJMT’s videos were very helpful but besides that, i just copied the title of whatever calculus lesson i was on and watched 30 minute long videos of someone going over the lesson or doing practice problems so i’d actually learn it. this came in handy for in-class tests and such because i learned 0% of the calculus i know in school lol. 

do all the problems you can. this is more geared towards doing well in your class rather than the ap test itself, but before a test or quiz, i would try to redo all the hardest practice problems in the textbook in order to review the information. 

find more practice problems online!! i love kutasoftware because they have such a wide range of calculus worksheets to practice with & sometimes my teacher even gave these out as homework problems. kutasoftware gives you problems and then the answers at the end, but it doesn’t show the work, so i’d use these sheets after getting a gist myself of the topic. 

check out my calculus tag. i didn’t really use any of the resources there but they might help you :)

memorize the steps!! i used to write out in words how to do things in order to break them down & simplify them. for example, if i was trying to learn how to derive something, i would write out line by line and number how exactly to do that (bringing the exponent to the front, subtracting one from the exponent, the chain rule, etc). this was so so helpful in getting me to understand how to get to the end result. 

pro tip: if you’re stumped on how to answer a free response question, write out your givens and your unknowns, and go from there. calculus questions are usually straightforward in what they want you to do, so writing everything out will help clear out your head. 

use slader!! slader has so many textbooks and step-by-step answers so fingers crossed you’ll be able to find yours so you can get help with problems you don’t get. i love slader so much, it’s a true blessing. 

study early for the exam ! my class finished all the needed material for the test a month before so we spent a month practicing and doing problems. that month is truly the reason why i passed.

get friends to help! when studying for the ap exam, i’d suggest getting a good friend group so you can work on the problems on your own, but still have someone there if you need help. for me, i really understood some topics well but there were others i was completely lacking on, and some of my friends were able to help me figure them out! two brains are better than one. 

my Most Vital resource !! my calculus teacher put a bunch of released free response packets online and i swear these questions were so similar to the ones on the exam!! there are 15 packets of free response questions with 6 questions each and if you google a couple of words in the question of the year you can find the answers worked out online as well!! also, there is a hUGE multiple choice packet with the questions from 1969-1998 !! all of these are college board resources so they’re Super Official and basically the only reason i passed. you can access the google drive folder here ! :-)

with the packets ^^, i think it’d be best if you did one or two packets a week during the month before your exam. i’d just suggest trying to really understand the topics and how to do them, and you’ll see improvement in your efforts. with the free response packets, i didn’t know a single thing and googled the answers for most of them, but that was what helped me learn the material by working backwards.