Lesson 25: Exam Strategy & Full-Course Review

The Shape of Your Exam Day

Section I (the sit-down exam): 70 multiple-choice questions, 120 minutes.

Section II (already underway): your Create PT (program + video + Personalized Project Reference, submitted by the spring deadline — April 30 for 2026; confirm your year's date) plus two written-response questions answered during the exam using your PPR. Together: 30% of your score.

No calculator — none needed. The Exam Reference Sheet (all the AP pseudocode: operators, list procedures, robot commands) is provided in the exam. You memorized nothing syntactic; you trained behaviors — 1-indexing, UNTIL polarity, RETURN's trapdoor.

Pacing: the 100-second economy

120 minutes ÷ 70 questions ≈ 103 seconds each. But questions aren't priced equally:

• Definitional items (CRD, CSN, IOC vocabulary): 20–40 seconds. These fund the budget.
• Standard code traces: 90–120 seconds with the trace table.
• Capstone traces (procedures + loops + lists) and robot journeys: 2.5–3 minutes — affordable because the definitionals ran fast.
• Passage set: 8–9 minutes for all five (Lesson 24's protocol).

Triage rules: First pass — answer everything answerable; any question stalled past ~2.5 minutes gets your best elimination guess, a circle in the booklet, and your departure. Second pass — return to circles with the remaining clock. Never leave blanks — there's no wrong-answer penalty; a 25% shot beats a 0% blank, and elimination usually makes it 50%.

The multi-select protocol (Q63–70)

Eight questions, two correct answers each, both-or-nothing scoring. The discipline:

1. Evaluate all four choices independently — true or false, each on its own merits.
2. You must end with exactly two trues. Three trues = you misjudged one; re-examine the shakiest.
3. Mark both. Verify you marked both (the #1 clerical error: finding both, bubbling one).
4. These reward precision over speed — they're mostly conceptual (packets, effects of innovations, list-operation truths), so the 100-second budget is comfortable if you don't rush the fourth choice.

Retrieval sprint — the whole course in one table

One line each. Cover the right column; recite; check. Anything you miss, reread that lesson's (b) section tonight.

Create PT + written-response final checklist

Section II is 30% — bank it before exam day:

• ☐ Program has: input, output, a list managing complexity, a student-developed procedure (named, parameterized, containing sequencing + selection + iteration), and a call to that procedure
• ☐ Video: ≈1 minute, shows the program running — input → functionality → output (record after testing boundary inputs; Lesson 2)
• ☐ Personalized Project Reference: screenshots of list creation AND use; procedure definition AND call — the PPR is all you'll have with you during the written responses, so make the screenshots complete and readable
• ☐ All borrowed code/media attributed per Lesson 22 (and current AI-assistance policy checked in the official directions)
• ☐ Rehearsed all four written-response categories: WR 1 (design/function/purpose), WR 2a (algorithm development), WR 2b (errors & testing — your bug journal), WR 2c (data & procedural abstraction — the "one name, many values / fixed once" paragraphs from Lessons 8 & 14)
• ☐ Submitted as final in the AP Digital Portfolio before the deadline — submitted, not just uploaded

Mixed Review Set — 20 Questions at Exam Weights

(≈2 CRD, 4 DAT, 7 AAP, 3 CSN, 4 IOC — matching the real form's proportions. Budget: 33 minutes. No notes, no peeking; this is your Mock-1 readiness gauge. Q19–20 are multi-select.)

x ← 3
y ← 8
x ← y − x
y ← y − x
DISPLAY (x + y)

k ← 20
REPEAT UNTIL (k ≤ 5)
{
    k ← k − 4
}

PROCEDURE mystery(list, v)
{
    n ← 0
    FOR EACH x IN list
    {
        IF (x = v)
        {
            n ← n + 1
        }
    }
    RETURN (n)
}