I'm junior in high school who follows this list, and I would just like to
give my comments on the Advanced Placement Physics B exam yesterday.
The section I multi-choice was _much_ easier than the practice tests that I
had been taking from the Barron's Review Book. The numbers came out to
integers almost every time, probably due to the exclusion of calculators on
this part. I omitted 3 questions, and felt very confidant of the rest of my
answers.
The section II was significantly harder, but not undoable. I was surprised
at the number of written sentence response questions used, as was my
teacher. My guess is that it's due to the emphasis on concepts and ideas of
physics rather than the number crunching. Going over the problems today in
class with my physics teacher, I can estimate that I got slightly over
half-correct. This is largely due to the fact that I get carried away when
writing explanations, and when I got to the thermal problem at the end, all
I had time to do was write PV/T.
In contrast with the many theories on 'crib sheets', the only formula that I
needed to look up (on section II) was the period of oscillation of a spring.
The formula sheet was not provided on section I, even though this section
did require knowledge of a _lot_ of formulas. This was confusing to me, I
thought that the whole point of the sheet was for students to not have to
memorize the formulas, but it was still necessary. Then again, the whole
idea of assessing one's knowledge on a multi-choice test perplexes me.
cache u l8r
--Chris
:) Christopher M. Maj ++++ Imajn8r
:) cmaj@buffnet.net ++++ http://www.buffnet.net/~cmaj
:) "Capital is the fruit of Labor; and thus, it belongs to Labor."
-Abraham Lincoln