Today was day 1 of final exams. The classes with odd hours met today and the rest will meet tomorrow.

AP Physics 1: AP Practice Exam

Students took a practice AP exam from the College Board. They did the free-response earlier this week, and the 90 minute final exam period was perfect for the multiple choice. I really pushed that I’ll be entering this into the gradebook very generously partly because the AP exams tend to have low percentage scores and partly because I want to use it very formatively. My two goals are for students to experience an (almost) complete AP exam and for me to see what topics I need to make sure we revisit before the real exam.

Physics: Lab Practical

For the first half of the exam, students took a fairly traditional individual final. For the second half, they worked on one of three lab practicals; every station asked students to find the mass of an unknown object, but we came up with stations using three different models. While all of the lab practical stations were related to labs we did in class this trimester, I got a lot of questions about how to use the LabQuests. The other physics teacher and I are thinking about what it might look like to have students build themselves a reference for key probeware skills. I also think this would have been a fun one to whiteboard and share results since groups were figuring out the same thing three different ways.

Unbalanced Force on a Particle Model

Momentum Transfer Model

Energy Transfer Model

Chemistry Essentials: Lab Practical

Similar to the physics class, the chemistry students took a pretty traditional individual final, then completed a lab practical. This tri, I had students identify a liquid based on the density. I was really pleased by how many students naturally used other observations to decide whether their result made sense.