How do I prepare for the AP Physics 1 exam? You *taper*.

[This was what I said during the introduction to the AP Physics 1 youtube show on April 6.]

Hi hello and welcome… I’m Greg Jacobs.  I teach at Woodberry Forest School, a boys boarding school in central Virginia.  

In the Before Times, I’d be sitting here at my desk with music playing while 15 or so students worked in the lab behind the camera… talking to each other about practice problems, showing me their work, doing experiments.  April is the best time of year in AP Physics 1 – the time to put it all together, to figure out not just how to use the disparate skills you’ve been taught, but when those skills should be applied in the first place.

And the time to do the putting it all together is now.  Learning physics is like preparing for the conference swim championships.  See, my wife Shari was a college swimmer.  She spent December and January in gruelling multi hour practices building muscle and technique.  (She was so tired from these that she often didn’t have the energy to walk across campus to get dinner – she’d instead eat five or so of the excess grapefruits that I was sending her from my backyard tree.)  But then in the weeks before the championship, the team tapered.  They still practiced every day, but less and less intensely.  The goal was to maintain, not to build.

And so it is in physics. You’ve spent the year building your knowledge. Now it’s time to start tapering.  Do a released AP problem.  Don’t ask for help, don’t ask “clarification” questions, just do the problem as if it were an exam. THEN, show your work to a teacher or a friend, or even to me. Right or wrong, you’ll have learned something!  It’s totally fine to make a mistake – in fact, now’s the time to make mistakes, so you don’t make them on the exam.  Redo the problem, though, until it’s right.  Then move on to another one.

The goal is to do a little bit every day to maintain your physics skills.  See, if you’re watching this, you probably are taking more than just one AP exam.  You’ll be so busy in May that you won’t have time for serious, in-depth physics study.  So don’t plan on that!  Plan on doing one multiple choice practice question a night in May… and the night before the exam, plan on having a not-physics party.  

When I taught in Florida, my night-before-the exam party was on the beach.  Here, it’s been at the pool or in the snack bar. There’s nothing you can do the night before the exam, any more than a football team can build strength through a 4-hour weightlifting session the night before the Rose Bowl.  So work now… make your mistakes now, correct your mistakes now, and you’ll build your confidence for May 14.