We all know the best way to prepare for a big exam is to take a practice exam that has the same quantity, type, and difficulty of questions as the actual exam, ideally under the same conditions. That is exactly what we had in mind as we created the Math Medic Practice Exam for AP Statistics, available for free to every teacher with a Math Medic account.
We wanted our Math Medic Practice Exam to look just like the real deal AP Statistics Exam, so we wrote 40 multiple choice questions and 6 free response questions (including one Investigative Task). Be sure to read all the way to the end of this blog post for more details about the creation of the Practice Exam!
Administering the Math Medic Practice Exam
The practice exam will be available in the Math Medic Assessment Platform in March. We recommend administering the exam similarly to how this year’s AP Statistics exam will be administered digitally – students will view all questions on a computer and will submit their multiple choice responses online, while solutions to free response questions will be written on paper.
Here are our suggestions for creating an environment that is close to the real deal AP Exam:
Share the questions digitally. In the Assessment Platform, the teacher can create a link to the exam questions so that students will be viewing the questions on a computer.
Have students submit multiple choice answers electronically. We will provide you with a Google Form for this!
Give students blank paper to write FRQ answers. This is good practice for the NEW digital AP exam. We will also provide you with a booklet for this (similar to the one provided by College Board here)!
Options for Administering the Math Medic Practice Exam:
Choose a Saturday or Sunday to have students sit for the full 3 hours.
Break it into parts and give it over several days during class.
Assign the Practice Exam as homework and give students several days to complete it.
Provide all materials to students to do at their own pace as an optional assignment.
Scoring the Practice Exam
We recommend not giving students a grade for their efforts on the Practice Exam–the intent is for them to learn where their deficits are before the actual exam. If students are focused on the gradebook, they may be tempted to cheat and won’t get as much out of the experience.
The Google Form will provide a score out of 40 for each student’s multiple choice section. You can update the settings to provide answers immediately after submission or at a designated time.
The answer key provided in the Assessment Platform gives student-friendly rubrics for the free response questions. While you can definitely score them yourself, it is also good practice for the students to score their own responses to become more familiar with what will and will not earn credit on the AP exam.
To keep things simple, the rubric for each question provides a list of requirements to earn an “E” (Essentially Correct), for each part or section, followed by the number of requirements that can still earn a “P” (Partially Correct). We used the most recent College Board rubrics as models to create our rubrics, but kept the language more simple. If students wonder if what they wrote will get credit, then we recommend it gets marked down. “When in doubt, mark it wrong” is a good mantra for practice tests so there will be no doubts on the real exam. Remember, the practice exam is a learning experience.
Students will use the scoring worksheet provided to convert their scores on the Practice Exam into a prediction for a 1 to 5 on the AP Exam.
How We Created the Practice Exam
For the multiple choice section, we looked at the released questions from three recent international exams and organized them by CED Topic, Math Medic AP Stats Lesson, and Difficulty Level. After analyzing the percentages of each category, we created a template for the 40 multiple choice questions to be included on our Math Medic Practice Exam. Then we started writing questions! All of our multiple choice questions are never-before-seen, unique questions that are modeled after real AP exam questions.
For the free response section, we studied the questions from the released AP Statistics exams from 2021 through 2024. We knew the free response questions should include at least one question from the four main concepts of AP Statistics: Exploring Data, Collecting Data, Probability and Sampling Distributions, and Inference, in addition to one question that spanned multiple concepts (#5) and an investigative task (#6)!
We hope your students can use the Math Medic Practice Exam experience to identify and learn from their mistakes so that they will find success on the big day!