Final Exam 2009: Information and Review Materials
Date and Time
The final exam will be on Friday, June 19, 2009. Arrive at 10:50 a.m. to the room announced by your teacher.
The exam is designed as a 90-minute exam, but all students will be allowed
30 minutes of extra time. In past years, many students have chosen to use the extra
30 minutes. Plan on being present until 1:00 p.m. so you can use the extra time if needed.
Students receiving extra time as an accommodation under an official plan (IEP, 504, or ICAP)
will have a maximum of 135 minutes, ending at 1:15 p.m., unless otherwise specified in the plan.
Exam Format
The exam will follow the same general format as in recent past years: three sections containing short, medium, and long free-response problems.
Here is the approximate format of the exam, although the number of problems in each part may vary slightly from what's listed.
- Part A. Short Problems: 8 problems, 2 points each, 16 points total. (Full credit given for correct answers; possible half-credit based on work shown.)
- Part B. Medium Problems: 4 problems, 4 points each, 16 points total. (Partial credit will be given.)
- Part C. Long Problems: 3 multi-part problems, 8 points each, 24 points total. (Partial credit will be given.)
Each problem is worth a specified number of points, from which a raw score out of 56 points will be calculated for each student.
The scale for converting from raw scores to letter grades will be determined statistically by the faculty with the goal of producing approximately the same mean
and standard deviation as during the rest of the year.
Calculator Policy
The exam requires a graphing calculator. There are no limitations as to what programs or information you may have stored on your calculator. However, the exam is intended to be taken using a empty calculator, and is intentionally designed to neutralize any advantages that might come from having extra programs or information. In fact, students who rely on calculator-stored information may disadvantage themselves as they expend time looking for information. The course faculty's best advice is that the most advantageous place to store information is in your brain! And past experience is that the students who do best on exams in this course are those who use their calclulators solely for appropriate mathematical tasks such as making graphs and tables, finding zeros, intersections, maxima and minima, and so on.
Topic Coverage
Here is a list of the major units of the course. Textbook references are: PC for Precalculus by Demana; AM for Advanced Mathematics by Brown.
Most topics appear in both books, but your class may have used only one book or the other for a particular topic.
- Functions, transformations, and limits: AM 1.2-1.5; extra handouts on transformations; limits in AM 10.3 or PC 19.1
- Polynomials, complex numbers, and rational functions: AM 2.1-2.7, part of 7.4
- Exponetnial, logarithmic, and logistic functions: AM 3.1-3.5, part of 3.6
- Trigonometric functions: AM 4.1-4.5, 4.7-4.8
- Geometric trigonometry (Laws of Sines and Cosines, etc.: AM 4.2/5.5/5.6 and/or PC 9.1-9.4
- Trigonometric identities: AM 5.1-5.4
- Vectors and parametric equations: AM 6.1-6.3; PC 12.1-12.9; extra handouts on three-dimensional space
- Matrices and linear systems: AM 7.2-7.3; extra handouts on transformation matrices
- Conic sections: PC 6.2; AM 8.1-8.3 and/or PC 6.3-6.6; PC 6.7
- Polar coordinates and equations: PC 6.4-6.6 and/or AM 11.1-11.4; polar conics in PC 8.5
- Sequences and series: AM 13.1-13.6, also in PC 9.4
Extra topics your class may have covered that will not be on the final include: Communication matrices, Markov chains (transition matrices), 3-D ellipsoids, mathematical induction.
Review Assignments
Here are four review problem sets, with answers. There are new versions of Review 3 and Review 4 this year that were used by some but not all teachers.
Mostly the problems are just rearranged, but there's one new problem in the new version (problem 3 in the new version of Review 4).
Past Final Exams
Here are the exams from the past eight years, with answers.