AP Calculus BC

Lisa's Website!!

Advice for incoming calculus students:

BC Calculus homework is optional, which has its benefits and drawbacks (which proved to be drawbacks for me!). In the beginning of the year I did all the homework and did well, but then started slacking off and my test scores dropped. However, it was nice to never have to do homework. I would suggest doing at least some of the problems during the week, so you don't have to try to cram before the test. For the AP test, I bought a review book which was really helpful. It explained the topics much better than the book did, plus I did many of the review problems and practice tests. I didn't study the series that much, and it came back to haunt me on the test--there were plenty of those questions and I had to leave some of them blank. I expect to get a 3, mainly because of stupid mistakes for instance, not reading the problem all the way. It also would've helped if I would've studied before 2 weeks before the test...they came around so fast this year, but I studied for calc every day after I realized that the test was only 2 weeks away!

2002 AP-BC Free Response Questions

For the first three questions, a calculator was required. For all three of them, I used my Texas Instruments TI-83 Plus Graphing Calculator.

#1: Easy for the most part (area and finding the minimum are easy). I still get confused on the different ways to do the volume, though...in this case it was washers.

#2: Very easy...integrating using a graphing calculator!

#3: Easy--finding slope, acceleration vectors, max height, speed, and average speed are all easy things.

#4: Easy--interpret the graph, increasing (first derivative), concavity (second derivative), sketch the graph...easy things yet again.

#5: Another easy problem--sketching the slope field, Euler's method (I love doing that--it's easy!!), part c was exactly like the Euler's method thing, and the last part was easy (use the second derivative!)

#6: More difficult for me...I already talked about my problems with series!! On the test, I almost got the interval of convergence right...I forgot about checking to see if the endpoints could be equal-to (=). The other parts were easy for me (Maclaurin series). It wasn't actually that bad.

I'm in Mr. Block's 2nd hour BC Calculus class for the school year of 2001-2002! Here are links to Calculus sites:

This website has derivative and integral solutions...with each step explained.

This website has several different tools/programs to calculate certain things, such as limits, derivatives, integrals, etc.

Karl's website is a calculus tutorial that includes derivatives, related rates, L'Hopital's rule, integration, etc. It has problems worked out step by step as well.

The integrator can integrate the functions that you enter in!

These are my personal favorite links: