Free Response Database

Many teachers like to give a practice exam a week before the actual AP^® exam. I used to bring the students in on a Saturday and tried to simulate the testing conditions as closely as possible.  In terms of an exam, I usually used one of the released multiple-choice exams and the free-response questions from the previous year.  But that was before students had easy access to the Internet and the free-response problems that teachers used to assume would never be seen by students were readily available.

Now anyone can see previous year's problems. They are on the College Board website: AP^® Central (https://apcentral.collegeboard.org) and there are questions dating back to 1998.

On MasterMathMentor.com, we have 4 full exams available in both AB and BC but some teachers still prefer to use actual AP test questions from previous years. They will construct an exam with 6 of these problems from different years so that even if students know the teacher is doing that, it does them little good. If they wish to memorize some 180 problems, each with 3 and 4 subparts, more power to them.

For those teachers, I have constructed a database that is intended to go hand-in-hand with my calculus manual. For each of the topics in the manual (both AB and BC), information is given as to what problem subparts they are emphasized, going from the last exam (2018) back to (1998). Since some years had a Form B exam, that represents 30 exams.   In that way, a teacher can create an exam containing the types of problems he or she wishes. For instance, if the teacher wants to be sure to include a problem involving a separable differential equation, it is easy to look at the database and identify the year and problem number in which that concept was tested.

Color coding is used to indicate problems that allowed the use of a graphing calculator and those that did not.

In addition, statistical data is given so that teachers can see the topics that are most and least likely to be tested .

The database is available in 2 forms:  First an Excel spreadsheet which takes up almost no memory and can be scrolled to show the years you wish. It contains both the AB database, the BC database, and the statistical data in 3 separate sheets.

For teachers not having Excel, there are separate PDF fies for the AB database, the BC database, and the statistical sheet.

These are completely free.  I hope you can put them to good use.

Free Response Database Download Options: