For AP Physics 1 teachers

AP Physics 1 Teacher Notes

Short, self-contained briefs built from the published College Board record — scoring guidelines, scoring commentary and Chief Reader Reports. Every claim is quoted from its source and cited, so you can check it, argue with it, or put it in front of a class on Monday.

Read the latest issue or get the next one by email

2023–2025exam record read end to end

2–4 pagesper issue, no filler

No signupevery issue downloads free

What these are

Not a summary of the course, and not advice about teaching. Each issue answers one narrow question about how the exam actually behaves, using documents the College Board has already published.

Quoted, not asserted

Every rule carries the document, question and year it came from. Where a scoring commentary explains why a response lost a point, you get the reader's own words rather than my paraphrase.

Written by a physics teacher

Twenty years teaching physics — six of them in a school, a stretch of it preparing students for IB — plus university lecturing and a physics doctorate. Never an AP classroom, which is exactly why these are built from the published record and not from anecdote.

Yours to print and copy

Print it, photocopy it for your students, drop it in your department's shared folder. No attribution required, no permission to ask for, nothing to sign.

Issues

Everything published stays here, free and without a form. Nothing is ever taken down or moved.

Issue 03 Available now

The Derivation Scaffold

A one-page handout for your students — and, on the reverse, the receipt for every row on it.

Two Chief Reader Reports ask teachers for the same object — a two-column chart, the words for each step on one side and the maths on the other — and a third supplies the rows to put in it. This is that chart, with each row tied to the rubric point it serves. Print it, photocopy it, hand it out.

0.64 → 0.17average on the first and last point of one derivation

0 → 4times a year the paper tells students where to begin, 2023 to 2026

1 pagefor the class, with the evidence for it on the reverse

The front carries the College Board's own worked answer laid into the scaffold, line by line, with the 2025 mean beside each point, and a blank grid underneath. The back shows where every row came from: the readers' three-line list from 2023, the sentence the exam paper started printing in 2024 and now prints four times a year, the three Scoring Notes that say what a bare answer buys — and the Sample Responses that show what the first point is not paid for. Where the scaffold does not generalise, it says so.

Sources: AP Physics 1 Chief Reader Reports, 2023–2025; 2025 Scoring Guidelines and Scoring Commentary; released free-response questions, 2023–2026.

Download Issue 03 · PDF, 2 pages, US Letter Also in A4. No email required.

Issue 02 Available now

Nine Things the Chief Reader Says Every Year

The advice repeated in 2023, 2024 and 2025 — with the twenty-seven quotations that prove it.

Every Chief Reader Report ends each free-response question by asking the readers the same thing: what advice would you offer teachers? Across three years that is fourteen blocks and eighty-eight separate bullets. Sorted by how many of the three years they appear in, the top of the list runs out fast.

9 of 88pieces of advice that appear in all three years

27quotations, each with the report page it came from

499,055exams read behind the fourteen advice blocks

One item counts only if it can be quoted from 2023, from 2024 and from 2025 — two years is not "every year." Nine survive: precise words instead of "gravity," task verbs, reading the prompt, derivations that start on the equation sheet, equations read as relationships, naming what a slope represents, constructing graphs rather than only reading them, justifying every step, and designing experiments with equipment that isn't enough. The three items that appeared in only two years out of three are printed too, marked as the weaker evidence they are.

Sources: AP Physics 1 Chief Reader Reports, 2023–2025, teacher-advice sections.

Download Issue 02 · PDF, 4 pages No email required.

Issue 01 Available now

Why Good Physics Earns Zero

Twelve rules from the AP Reading that decide whether a correct idea becomes a point.

The 2025 Chief Reader Report did something the earlier ones did not: it published the mean score for every individual rubric point, not just for each question. Lined up, all forty tell one story. Students do not run out of physics. They run out of finishing.

0.75 / 1average on the first point of each question

0.33 / 1average on the last point of each question

10%earned the exam's lowest-scoring point, which asked for no calculation

So the issue collects the rules that decide whether a correct idea turns into a score: why a general equation is not a conservation statement, why an attempt at functional dependence earns the point even when the dependence is wrong, why "human error" is worth exactly nothing, and nine more. Each one is quoted from a published scoring document and paired with the sentence to say in class instead.

Sources: AP Physics 1 Scoring Guidelines and Scoring Commentary, 2023–2025; Chief Reader Reports, 2023–2025.

Download Issue 01 · PDF, 4 pages No email required.

What's coming next

04Task Verbs Decoded — what derive, justify and calculate each require
05Where the Points Actually Go — the 2025 point-level means, question by question
06Five Sentences That Cost Points
07The Lab Question Playbook

Scoring keys for the workbook

The workbook's free-response problems, scored point by point. Each key says what earns every point and — the part published guidelines leave to the reader's judgement — the least a student can put on the page and still be given it. Written so a set of twenty-five papers can be graded in a quarter of an hour, and graded the same way twice.

Unit 1 Kinematics Problems 1.1–1.5 · 52 rubric points · 16 pages · A4 Download PDF
Unit 2 Force and Translational Dynamics In preparation
Unit 3 Work, Energy, and Power In preparation
Unit 4 Linear Momentum In preparation
Unit 5 Torque and Rotational Dynamics In preparation
Unit 6 Energy and Momentum of Rotating Systems In preparation
Unit 7 Oscillations In preparation
Unit 8 Fluids In preparation

New units appear here as they are written, in course order. Free, no email required, same as the issues. The points are mine, not the College Board's — the format follows their published scoring guidelines, but where to draw each line is a reading of the standard you are free to disagree with.

Using these with your students

Every issue and every scoring key is free to use, in any form and for any teaching purpose. Print it, copy it for a class or a whole department, upload it to your LMS, quote it in a meeting or a training session. No permission needed, no attribution required. If a colleague would find an issue useful, share this page rather than the file itself — the page always carries the current version.