2024 AP Calculus BC FRQ’s are here!
On Monday, my students took the AP Calculus BC exam. It’s hard to describe the butterflies, general nervousness, excitement, pride that I feel on exam day. I woke up on Monday in disbelief that we had arrived at ‘game day’ as I call it. Right after the exam, a good amount of them hustled over to my room to all excitedly tell me what their reactions were to the FRQ’s and it was so funny to watch them all crowing around all trying to get a word in edgewise as my Algebra II sophomores quietly sat there staring at the chaos. The general consensus was that FRQ 1 and 2 were easy because they were predictable (with the exception of #1d); FRQ’s 3 and 4 were easy because they were AB content; FRQ 5 was fine; FRQ 6 was difficult and they only had a handful on minutes left by that point in the exam marathon. I couldn’t believe that #2 wasn’t a polar problem! I was sure CollegeBoard would have brought back polar since it hasn’t been an FRQ since 2019.
After anxiously waiting the required 48 hours, I finally got to see the questions yesterday and had a chance to work through them yesterday and today.
I thought they were very fair and doable, although I have to admit I read and re-read question 1d (about the rate of change of the coffee) about 25 times. I just couldn’t wrap my head around exactly what it was asking at first! Some of my students incorrectly thought that they needed to compare the signs of velocity and acceleration like they did when deciding in a particle was speeding up or slowing down. The correct justification required the use of C’’(t) to determine if C’(t) was increasing or decreasing. I liked how question 5 had an Euler’s method that had a step size of pi rather than just an integer. I found part d to be somewhat random and unrelated to the question stem, but it’s hard to weave in an integration of parts question.
I actually LOVED question 6, particularly how they began with a series generator that didn’t look alternating and then turned it into an alternating series in part b. I realized after doing part c that I need to emphasize more that f(x), F(x), and f’(x) all have the same radius and intervals of convergence. Part d was a great ratio test because it involved a square root which made it unique from the typical problem.
Some of my students went through my work with me and we predicted how many points each part would be and they tried to predict their score on each FRQ . A lot of them use the Albert.io exam score calculator predictor: general website HERE and Calculus BC specific site HERE.