Working with Stu Schwartz's Review Materials
I run into these packets pretty often, especially around the spring when teachers are looking for free AP Calc resources. Stu Schwartz put together a holiday packet that covers a lot of ground. It's typically a collection of review problems organized by topic, meant to keep students sharp over a break. The answer key is what most people end up searching for, and I get it. His materials live on his website, which is a straightforward page at stuscalculushub.com or through his personal school district page. The holiday packet usually shows up as a PDF download along with its corresponding solution set. When you're looking for the answers specifically, they're sometimes posted as a separate document rather than embedded in the same file as the questions. I spent a good hour last December digging through link rot on his old school page before I realized he'd reorganized everything. The current setup puts solutions on the same page as the worksheet, just further down, with each problem labeled clearly. It's not the most intuitive layout, but it works once you know where to click. The one trick I wish I'd known earlier is that the answer key uses different formatting than the problem set. Some solutions show only the final answer, while others walk through a couple of steps. On problem 14, which asks for the limit of a rational function as x approaches 2, the packet gives you the answer as a simplified fraction but doesn't show the factoring work. I tried to reverse-engineer the solution from the answer alone and ended up going down a rabbit hole with L'Hopital's rule when the problem was designed to be solved by algebraic simplification. Factoring the numerator and denominator separately fixed it in about thirty seconds.
Another edge case I hit involves the related rates section. The answer key lists numerical results, but a couple of the problems ask you to interpret the answer in context, like whether a volume is increasing or decreasing at a specific moment. The key gives you the rate but not always the interpretation phrase. Students lose points on AP exams for leaving that part out, so I always recommend writing out the full sentence even if the packet doesn't explicitly show it. Here's the straightforward path: go to Stu's site, find the AP Calculus AB or BC review section, look for the packet labeled as a holiday or winter break assignment, and scroll past the problem set to the solutions. The PDFs are free and don't require an account. If the direct link is broken, use the Wayback Machine and pull the last archived snapshot from the 2023 to 2025 period. One thing the packet doesn't do well is cover every variant of a problem you might see on the actual exam. The multiple choice section sticks closely to the standard format, but the free response questions are somewhat simplified compared to what the College Board releases. If you're using this purely to check your homework answers, it's fine. If you're using it as your main study resource in the last few weeks before the exam, you'll want to supplement it with released FRQ sets from 2019 onward. The Schwartz packet is good for practice and building fluency, but it won't replace the official material for exam prep.
Also worth noting: the packet occasionally has a typo or two. I caught one in the 2022 version where the derivative of a trig problem listed the wrong sign in the answer key. It was easy to catch because the result didn't match what you get if you actually work through it, so always verify answers against your own calculations rather than assuming the key is gospel.
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