FRQ Practice Ideas for Next Year
It’s that time of year again…my seniors have gone, I find myself with a bit more unstructured time during the school day, and my mind is flooded with ideas to try for next year and things to improve. I typically use my increased free time to look up ideas, read math blogs, and brainstorm alternate approaches, and I always find this process exciting and hopeful. Even though some things may not have gone exactly as planned or hoped during any given school year, there is always the next year to aim for better or try incorporating a new lesson or classroom routine/structure.
I have ideas for how to improve student organization and notebooks, which I will write about later this week, but one curriculum-based thing I keep thinking about is how I want to improve my FRQ review to the next level next year. I saw a post on the AP Calculus teacher Facebook page last month where a teacher compiled all of the AP Live Review sessions on YouTube with links to a PDF of each FRQ or MC set of problems. She created a Google Sheet that contains everything, and it is amazing:
The teacher described how she was using this CollegeBoard resource: she would hand out the new practice FRQ just released by CollegeBoard for students to try for 15 or so minutes. Then she would play the 10-15 minute video of well-known AP Calculus teachers going over the questions in detail. The AB videos were created by Virge Cornelius and Mark Kiraly while the BC videos were created by Tony Record and Bryan Passwater. She said the students found it very helpful to hear the problems explained step-by-step by different Calculus teachers who might reason their way through the problem differently or say things in a slightly different way, which could ultimately resonate with a student who wasn’t quite understanding it fully before. We do a lot of FRQ practice in class, either in the form of group quizzes, where I give no help as they complete it (but give feedback in writing when I grade it and return within a a day or two) or as collaborative classwork, where I walk around and give feedback and suggestions as they work. The method that I described above is a new approach that I’d like to try, since it mimics a quiz as it is happening, but is low-stakes since it is not graded for accuracy, AND they get immediate, detailed feedback right after taking it rather than having to wait for me to grade and return it.
The biggest obstacle to this is, of course, TIME, since I get my students right from Pre-Calculus and teach all of BC in one year without a double period. I am still making it my goal to begin this in early April, maybe during after-school sessions, advisory period, or even during lunch when I have them long block if I bring in pizzas to get them to stay, which would buy us an extra half hour. Again, just ideas for now, and it will largely depend on pacing next year and how many class interruptions I have throughout the school year.
I made PDF copies of the six AP Live FRQ’s from 2024 and the two sets of MC practice. I remember finding amazing sets of ‘Sample MC and FRQ’ questions in 2016 released by CollegeBoard right around the time of the exam restructuring, the creation of the new curriculum map, and the launch of AP Classroom (it’s weird to think there was no AP Classroom during my first few years teaching AP Calculus). I printed the sample MC question sets and FRQ’s for both AB and BC, and the questions were amazing - brand new, challenging, and excellent review. I used these right before the exam in 2017 with my students when we were reviewing. I can no longer find these sample MC sets or FRQ’s online and I don’t even have a digital copy on my laptop, so I am so glad I printed them out to keep using them on paper! In the event CollegeBoard ever removes or takes down these new AP Live review questions and the links in the above Google Sheet no longer work, I downloaded them to have them as high-quality review. I am uploading them here for future reference:
MC SET 1: NO CALC
MC SET 2: CALC ACTIVE
FRQ 1: Polar
FRQ 2: Euler/Riemann/Particle
FRQ 3: Rate In/Out
FRQ 4: Taylor/Error
FRQ 5: Slope Field/Logistic
FRQ 6: Series
I really like these new questions, and the fact that there was a Polar sample FRQ had me convinced that there would be a Polar FRQ again on the actual exam, which there was not. Regardless, these questions further demonstrate to students that the FRQ’s are relatively predictable, which makes it even better to get fresh questions from the ultimate source to try out.