Reviewing for the AP Physics 1 exam: No big practice exam, but Big Butt Fundamentals Quiz

I take an approach to exam review that's consciously different from what other teachers do.  I am doing no tests at all this month, no practice AP exams.  We're solving one authentic AP Physics 1 free response in each assignment; we're practicing a couple of multiple choice questions each day.  We're doing corrections on anything we miss.  I'm getting students to grade other students' work to an AP rubric wherever possible.

Why am I not doing practice exams?  Because every test we've taken all year has been in (or close to) AP format and style.  My students know how to pace themselves so as not to run out of time.  They know how to communicate enough to get credit, but not so much that they waste time and ink.  They know the level of difficulty they will face on multiple choice and free response problems... because we are doing some each day.

Importantly, while I'm giving some questions for homework, I'm doing others as brief in-class quizzes.  It is critical that students have practice working on AP level problems without a safety net, without the ability to ask friends or teachers clarifying questions.  But we do that all year, on every test and quiz!  Since I never allow students to ask questions on tests or quizzes, I feel no pressure now to give any further authentic AP practice.

One type of major assessment that I do use is the "Big Butt Fundamentals" quiz.  I give students 30 minutes to answer 30 questions that are, for the most part, straight off the fact sheet.  The first twenty questions are pure recall; the last ten require some processing, but are still testing misconceptions or ideas that are fundamental to students' knowledge of physics.  Feel free to use this quiz in your own class.  I create it by randomizing the fact sheet, and then just riffing off each fact.

The purpose of the Big Butt Fundamentals quiz isn't to play "gotcha".  It's to get students' noses into their fact sheet.  It's to show the students what they know well, building confidence; it's to show students what they might have forgotten, leading the students themselves to look up the correct answer or to discuss the question with friends.

I ask students to correct the Big Butt quiz by writing a complete sentence stating the reasoning or fact behind each answer.  Rather than just writing "kx", they'd write "the force of a spring is kx."  They are putting their answers in context.  

I don't ask for complete sentences as a punishment, or because my ed school training or my teacher's edition told me to... I'm making the students write so that they have a better chance of remembering a fact that they already got wrong once.  My students are generally cooperative with this rationale, because (a) I don't ask them to do much this time of year anyway, and (b) they see by now the connection between correcting what they get wrong the first time, and strong performance on future physics problems.   As we say, practice doesn't make perfect.  Perfect practice makes perfect.