Algebra II Final Exams + AP Calculus Summer Work
Two of the last big things I do at the end of every school year are create an Algebra II final exam for my sophomores and update/revise the summer work for my upcoming AP Calculus BC students.
For the first time ever, I incorporated multiply choice in my Algebra II final exam. Every year, I change the final exam slightly or even majorly depending on what concepts we might not have covered all the way or what topics were emphasized more that year. Also, I just like to change things up and maintain integrity - the students talk so much right after taking an exam that if I didn’t ever change it, each new group would know exactly what the exam contained and not properly study.
I had always been against multiple choice on exams, especially final exams, since I didn’t want students just guessing. I wanted to see exactly what they knew and wanted to make sure their notation was correct and work was shown out. However, giving a two-hour, ten-page final exam with all open response meant that it took a long time to grade three sections-worth of tests. Last year I spent close to 20 hours grading about 70 exams and vowed that I would never go through that again! Especially since this year I knew I would be busy reading AP exams for CollegeBoard, something that overlapped with my school’s final exams week.
I modeled my final exam loosely on CollegeBoard’s AP exam structure. There were three sections:
Calculator active: 5 open-response
Non-Calculator: 5 open-response
Non-Calculator: 62 multiple-choice
I spent a long time finding and looking through numerous sources to create the multiple choice questions. Now I can appreciate why CollegeBoard releases the Free Response questions every year but hasn’t released a full multiple-choice section in over a decade. They want to be able to reuse or slightly modify their previously-used multiple-choice questions, which are much more labor-intensive to write than open-response style questions.
The work put into creating the newly updated final exam was well worth it. It ended up being the perfect length (nearly everyone finished in the allotted two-hour time slot) and it was so amazing scanning the multiple-choice and immediately being able to tell them what they got on that half of the exam. GradeCam is a life-saver for scanning multiple-choice exams!
I graded the open-response sections fresh off of AP reading week, and it that experience showed me anything, it was just how efficiently I could grade something given a clear rubric and repetition. I graded all 70 of the open-response portion in less than three hours!
The other thing I did was get ready for AP Day, when I meet my upcoming AP Calculus students, give them their summer work, and tell them any important details to ensure a successful start to next year. I know that summer work is a controversial topic and some teachers are very against it, but given my school’s population, some level of buy-in from the students has shown to be helpful. I create my summer work so that it can be completed in 4-5 hours total, depending on how efficiently a student is working and whether they remember their Algebra II and Pre-Calculus concepts.
Before AP Day, I create new classrooms for the online platforms we use, including Deltamath, Desmos Classroom, EdPuzzle, and of course Google Classroom. I spend a couple hours getting my Google Classroom all set up with a custom banner, the topics coded by emojis, and additional resources and extra help links included. AP Classroom join codes aren’t available until the start of the new school year.
My summer work is half paper and half Deltamath. I always staple the following half-sheet printed on colorful paper to the front of the packet:
These are the topics included in the Deltamath portion:
Normally by now, CollegeBoard would have released next year’s AP exam schedule and I would have been able to include it on the above half-sheet of information for my students. For whatever reason, CollegeBoard has not done that yet. I’ve been Google searching every few days with no luck, but this Reddit post popped up today when I searched. Who knows if it’s accurate, but if it is, it would be the first time in over a decade that AP Calculus was the LAST AP exam administered during those two weeks. During my first few years teaching AP Calculus, the exam was towards the end of the first week. Then it was the first day of the second week (including this year). I hope it’s not at the end of the second week like this post shows - seniors are so checked out by then and run the risk of having prom or senior skip day right around that time.
Time will tell how true the above post is, but for now it’s time to relax now that these two tasks are done, the AP exam reading week is over, and my school year is officially done!