Many colleges have made it mandatory for students who are studying Science, Technology and Engineering (STEM) and Business to study calculus for one or more semester. Students can get credits for the calculus or skip the course if they have a good enough score in the Advanced Placement (AP) calculus exam . This exam is further classified into the ab exam, which is equivalent to one semester of calculus and the BC exam which is equivalent to two semesters of college level calculus. Though more students take the ab level calculus exam, many students are interested in taking the BC exam and would like to find out how is the ap calc bc exam scored.
The subjects tested in the BC exam are more comprehensive compared to the AB exam conducted by the College Board, a non profit organization. Some of the subjects tested are functions, graphs, limits, derivatives and their applications, integrals with applications, constants series, the taylor series, polynomial series and approximations. Like all AP exams, the score for the exam will vary from 1 to 5 . Students should aim to get a high score, of 4 or 5, which will make it easier to get credits for the course in colleges, or advance placement. However each college/school has different criteria for determining the acceptable score.
The scoring for the exam is divided into two different sections, a multiple choice and free response section of 54 points each. In the multiple choice section there are 45 questions, and the student will get one point for each answer which is correct, and zero for unanswered questions or incorrect answers. The score of the multiple choice section is then multiplied by 1.2 to get a score out of 54. For the free response section there are six questions with different subsections, and each question is worth nine points each. The answers in this section are evaluated by AP calculus teachers and professors.
Combining scores in both the sections, gives a composite score which may vary from 0 to 108. The officials who are handling the AP testing will then decide how to scale the composite raw scores, to give a score between 1 to 5. Typically the students whose raw scores are higher than 70 are given a score of five, while students who get a score of less 35 are given a score of one. Every year the officials will decide different composite scores for the scaled scores based on the test results and other factors, and there are no standard tables.