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2024 AP Physics 1 Exam Guide

8 min read•june 18, 2024

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AP Physics 1 🎡

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Your Guide to the 2024 AP Physics 1 Exam

We know that studying for your AP exams can be stressful, but Fiveable has your back! We created a study plan to help you crush your AP Physics 1 exam. This guide will continue to update with information about the 2024 exams, as well as helpful resources to help you do your best on test day. Unlock Cram Mode for access to our cram events—students who have successfully passed their AP exams will answer your questions and guide your last-minute studying LIVE! And don't miss out on unlimited access to our database of thousands of practice questions.

Format of the 2024 AP Physics 1 Exam

Going into test day, this is the exam format to expect:

Section I: Multiple Choice
- 50% of score | 1 hour and 30 minutes to complete
  - Section 1A: Single-select
    - 45 questions where you choose a single best answer
  - Section 1B: Multiple-select
    - 5 questions where you choose all correct answers
Section II: Free-Response Questions
- 50% of score | 1 hour and 30 minutes to complete
  - 5 questions
    - Experimental design (12 pts)
    - Qualitative/quantitative translation (12 pts)
    - Paragraph argument short answer (7 pts)
    - 2 short answers (7 pts each)

When is the 2024 AP Physics 1 Exam and How Do I Take It?

The exam is on paper at your school on Friday, May 17, 2024, at 8:00 AM, your local time.

How Should I Prepare for the Exam?

First, download the AP Physics 1 Cheatsheet PDF - a single sheet that covers everything you need to know at a high level. Take note of your strengths and weaknesses!
We've put together the study plan found below to help you study between now and May. This will cover all of the units and essay types to prepare you for your exam. Pay special attention to the units that you need the most improvement in.
Study, practice, and review for test day with other students during our live cram sessions via Cram Mode. Cram live streams will teach, review, and practice important topics from AP courses, college admission tests, and college admission topics. These streams are hosted by experienced students who know what you need to succeed.

Pre-Work: Set Up Your Study Environment

Before you begin studying, take some time to get organized.

🖥 Create a study space.

Make sure you have a designated place at home to study. Somewhere you can keep all of your materials, where you can focus on learning, and where you are comfortable. Spend some time prepping the space with everything you need and you can even let others in the family know that this is your study space.

📚 Organize your study materials.

Get your notebook, textbook, prep books, or whatever other physical materials you have. Also, create a space for you to keep track of review. Start a new section in your notebook to take notes or start a Google Doc to keep track of your notes. Get yourself set up!

📅 Plan designated times for studying.

The hardest part about studying from home is sticking to a routine. Decide on one hour every day that you can dedicate to studying. This can be any time of the day, whatever works best for you. Set a timer on your phone for that time and really try to stick to it. The routine will help you stay on track.

🏆 Decide on an accountability plan.

How will you hold yourself accountable to this study plan? You may or may not have a teacher or rules set up to help you stay on track, so you need to set some for yourself. First, set your goal. This could be studying for x number of hours or getting through a unit. Then, create a reward for yourself. If you reach your goal, then x. This will help stay focused!

AP Physics 1 2024 Study Plan

🏃🏻‍♂️ Unit 1: Kinematics

Big takeaways:

Unit 1 is focused on the basics of motion. Describing how an object moves in a straight line and projectile motions. Also, key ideas such as slopes and areas of a graph are used to change from displacement to velocity to acceleration and back. While this topic does stand on its own fairly well, you’ll often see projectile motion questions attached to the end of an FRQ from a different unit.

Definitely do this:

📖 Read these Fiveable study guides:

🎥 Watch these videos:

If you have more time or want to dig deeper:

🎮 Play around with some simulations:

🌀 Unit 2: Dynamics

Big takeaways:

Dynamics is the study of the forces, the interactions of an object with another object, that cause objects and systems to move. The basic understanding of force as a push or pull helps to solidify the notion that it is a vector quantity and has both magnitude and direction.

Similar to that of Unit 1, translation is key in Unit 2. You must be able to show the same object–force interactions through different graphs, diagrams, and mathematical relationships. During Unit 2, you will also learn a necessary skill throughout the remaining units of AP Physics 1: how to derive new expressions from fundamental equations to form predictions in unfamiliar scenarios.

Definitely do this:

🎥 Watch these videos:

📖Read these Fiveable study guides:

If you have more time or want to dig deeper:

🎮 Play around with some simulations

🚀 Unit 3: Uniform Circular Motion & Gravity

Big takeaways:

Unit 3 takes the ideas learned from Unit 2 and applies them to objects moving in a circular path with a constant speed. Combining this with Newton’s Law of Gravity lets us solve problems involving planetary orbits and satellites, as well as describing changes in weight when we move from one location to another. Similar to Unit 1, these concepts are often embedded into other FRQ and are rarely asked in stand-alone questions.

Definitely do this:

🎥 Watch these videos:

📖Read these Fiveable study guides:

If you have more time or want to dig deeper:

🎮 Play around with some simulations

⚡️ Unit 4: Energy

Big takeaways:

Unit 4 is another vital unit in terms of the AP exam. The skills and ideas learned here will show up again and again in Unit 5-7. In addition, there is ALWAYS an FRQ that is solvable by using the energy concepts. Key concepts that you need to be comfortable with include applying the Law of Conservation of Energy to a variety of problems, defining systems, and calculating the work done to or by a system.

Definitely do this:

🎥 Watch these videos:

📖Read these Fiveable study guides:

If you have more time or want to dig deeper:

🎮 Play around with some simulations

🏌🏻‍♂️ Unit 5: Momentum

Big takeaways:

Unit 5 introduces the idea of the Law of Conservation of Momentum. This lets us describe and calculate masses, velocities, and energies before and after collisions or explosions. This unit draws on many of the skills learned in Unit 4, especially the concept of kinetic energy. Be sure you know how to apply the conservation laws. As far as FRQs go, momentum questions can be stand-alone but are often incorporated into questions involving forces (Unit 2) or energy (Unit 4).

Definitely do this:

🎥 Watch these videos:

📖Read these Fiveable study guides:

🎸 Unit 6: Simple Harmonic Motion

Big takeaways:

Unit 6 focuses on the concept of periodic motion, a motion that repeats over and over in a set time interval. Two commonly used examples of this are a mass oscillating on a spring and a pendulum swinging at a small angle. In analyzing these two systems, we’ll draw on forces (unit 2), energy (unit 4), and some trigonometry. Be sure you know how to calculate period and frequency as well. Regarding FRQs, SHM topics are often embedded into questions regarding energy but could be seen as a stand-alone question as well.

Definitely do this:

🎥 Watch these videos:

Simple Harmonic Oscillators

📖Read these Fiveable study guides:

If you have more time or want to dig deeper:

🎮 Play around with some simulations

🎡 Unit 7: Rotation

Big takeaways:

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the last unit on this year’s AP exam! Unit 7 takes all the concepts we’ve covered so far in Units 1-6 and applies them to solving problems involving rotating objects. You’ll need to be able to calculate angular distance, velocity and acceleration (unit 1), torques (units 2 and 3), rotational kinetic energy (unit 4), angular momentum (unit 5), and period/frequencies (unit 6). Because there are so many connections to the previous units, FRQ’s from unit 7 are robust enough to stand on their own, and will often only focus on a small subset of the skills from this Unit. Oftentimes, these subsets are either torque and forces or energy. Some of the other skills such as angular momentum can be combined with the planetary motion questions from unit 3.

Definitely do this:

🎥 Watch these videos: