Princeton Ap Physics 1

What You Actually Get When You Buy Princeton Review's AP Physics 1 Prep

The Princeton Review offers a few different products for AP Physics 1: a printed study guide called "Cracking the AP Physics 1 Exam," an online course, and a couple of practice tests included in both. The core promise is that their materials mirror the College Board's actual test format and difficulty. Most students who buy into this are looking for a shortcut through the content. It doesn't work like that. But the materials aren't useless either. They're just directional. The study guide itself runs about 500 pages and covers kinematics, Newton's laws, work and energy, momentum, rotation, oscillations, and electric charge and circuits. That last unit is where things get interesting because it's a relatively new addition to the exam. The book gives you diagnostic quizzes at the front, strategy sections for multiple choice and free response, and several full-length practice tests. The strategy sections are worth more than most students give them credit for. The book explains how to approach the free response questions in particular, showing you that they want you to derive equations from scratch rather than plug numbers in. That's actually true to the real exam. My own experience with this book was mixed. I went through it twice during my senior year, once in the fall as a preview and once in the spring to drill weak spots. The practice tests were the most useful part, but only if you graded them honestly. Students routinely say "oh I got 4 out of 5 on this test" when they really got 2.8. The scoring rubric on the free response is brutal. If your derivation skips a step or uses a variable the question told you not to use, you lose points. I found myself having to redo free response answers three or four times before they matched what the official rubric would accept. The third attempt is usually the only one that counts as real preparation.

One edge case that caught me off guard: the practice test included a rotation problem where the axis of rotation wasn't at the center of mass. I kept defaulting to treating it as if it were, and that changed the moment of inertia calculation entirely. The book mentioned this briefly in the chapter on rotational mechanics but didn't make it a focus. On the actual exam, they love putting the pivot point somewhere weird to catch people who memorized standard formulas without understanding why those formulas exist. After that, I started drawing every single diagram with the axis of rotation explicitly marked before doing any math. It added about 30 seconds per problem but prevented three wrong answers on test day.

How the Online Course Compares

The Princeton Review online course for AP Physics 1 gives you about 16 hours of video lectures, interactive practice problems, and a few extra practice tests beyond what's in the book. The videos are fine for someone who learns better from watching someone explain a concept on a whiteboard than reading it. The instructors aren't particularly engaging but they get the point across. Where the online course adds real value is in the interactive practice problems. They give you immediate feedback on wrong answers, which is better than sitting alone with the book and never knowing if your reasoning is off. The main limitation of the online course is pacing. It's not adaptive. You can't tell it "I'm struggling with torque" and have it focus there. You're stuck going through the curriculum in order, which means you spend time on topics you already understand while barely getting reinforcement on the ones that actually trip you up. I'd recommend using it selectively. Skip ahead through the kinematics section if you've already taken mechanics in high school, then spend your time on the torque and energy chapters where most students lose points.

The Practice Tests Are the Only Thing That Matters

Everything else is supplementary. The practice tests are what actually tell you where you stand. There are two full-length tests in the book and a couple more through the online platform. I took all of them under timed conditions, standing away from my notes and desk the way the real exam would be administered. The difference between my first and last practice test score was roughly 30 percent. That range is normal. The improvement came from recognizing patterns in the multiple choice questions — the same concept gets tested six different ways across the exam, and once you've seen four of them, the fifth one stops looking scary. Here's the counter-intuitive part that nobody tells you: the hardest questions on AP Physics 1 aren't the math-heavy ones. They're the conceptual ones that look easy. Questions like "a block slides down a frictionless incline. If you double the mass, what happens to the time it takes to reach the bottom?" You can solve this with equations in about 45 seconds if you know what you're doing, but the question is designed so that plugging in random formulas gives you the wrong answer. You need to understand that mass cancels out. The exam rewards people who can reason through a problem without immediately reaching for an equation. I lost three points on the real exam to questions exactly like this one. Afterward, I went back and specifically practiced identifying which problems could be solved conceptually versus computationally. It made the multiple choice section significantly less stressful.

What This Material Doesn't Cover Well

The Princeton Review materials don't prepare you well for the lab-based free response question. Every AP Physics 1 exam includes a question where you're given data from an experiment and asked to analyze it. This might involve graphing, determining uncertainty, or explaining sources of error. The book touches on this in a generic way but doesn't give you enough practice with the specific format. The College Board has released some lab questions publicly, and working through those independently is more effective than anything in the prep materials. I spent about four hours going through past FRQs that involved data analysis and graphing, and that was more valuable than an entire chapter in the review book. Another gap: the curriculum has shifted. Electric charge and circuits was added to the exam in 2024, and the Princeton Review materials reflect the newer syllabus but sometimes lag behind the actual weighting. On the real exam, that unit accounts for roughly 8 to 12 percent of the multiple choice section and may appear as one of the free response questions. Make sure you don't under-study it because the book gives it less space than the older topics like kinematics and Newton's laws. The book dedicates about 60 pages to circuits; that's reasonable but not generous if you've never seen this material before.

Bottom Line

Princeton Review's AP Physics 1 materials are adequate. They won't carry you to a 5 on their own. You need to supplement them with official College Board past exams, targeted practice on the lab question format, and honest self-scoring on every practice test you take. The study guide is useful as a content review and strategy reference. The online course is marginally helpful for interactive practice but not essential. The practice tests inside the book are the core product and they're worth doing twice. I'd estimate that following this approach consistently over a six-week period, two to three hours per week, gives you the best shot at a score above 3. Going beyond that requires either teacher support or additional resources like Khan Academy's AP Physics 1 unit quizzes and the College Board's FRQ scoring guidelines.