Teaching AP Calculus for the first time: the two-minute guide

Nobody hands a new AP Calculus teacher a manual, but College Board has written one. It is spread across a handful of pages, and that is the whole problem: it is easy to spend your first August reading the wrong things. This is the short route through it.

Read one document first: the Course and Exam Description

The Course and Exam Description (CED) is the core document for the subject. Everything else — your syllabus, your pacing, your tests — hangs off it. College Board describes the framework as specifying what students must know, be able to do, and understand, organised around big ideas and a set of skills it calls Mathematical Practices.

For AP Calculus AB the framework is arranged in eight units, and each carries an exam weighting you can plan against:

• Unit 1: Limits and Continuity — 10–15%
• Unit 2: Differentiation: Definition and Fundamental Properties — 10–15%
• Unit 3: Differentiation: Composite, Implicit, and Inverse Functions — 5–10%
• Unit 4: Contextual Applications of Differentiation — 10–15%
• Unit 5: Analytical Applications of Differentiation — 15–20%
• Unit 6: Integration and Accumulation of Change — 15–20%
• Unit 7: Differential Equations — 5–10%
• Unit 8: Applications of Integration — 10–15%

Those weightings are the single most useful thing a first-year teacher can hold in their head: they are the difference between covering the course and panicking about it.

The six steps College Board itself lists

AP Central's "Teaching AP for the First Time?" page lays out six steps. They are worth following in order, because the early ones unlock the later ones:

1. Explore the course and exam pages for your course. The CED, exam dates, AP Classroom information and professional-learning links all live there.
2. Complete the AP Course Audit (required). It is the authorisation process for offering the course, and it is also what grants access to AP Classroom and to the AP Program's emails. Review the Syllabus Development Guide, sample syllabi and recommended textbook list while you are in there.
3. Sign in to AP Classroom. It provides unit guides for every topic and skill, progress checks, and a question bank you can build tests from, plus AP Practice Exams to assign. It opens for the upcoming school year on July 1 for teachers who have completed the Course Audit — which is why step 2 comes first.
4. Take the professional learning. An AP Summer Institute before the year starts is the most thorough option (College Board says funding is available), and online workshops run during the year.
5. Join the AP Community. A collaborative space where new and experienced teachers ask questions and share lessons — and where a first-year teacher gets answers fastest.
6. Learn about AP score reports. So that when results land in July you can actually read them.

AB or BC?

If you are choosing between them: every topic in the eight units of AP Calculus AB is also in AP Calculus BC. BC adds two more units — Unit 9, parametric equations, polar coordinates and vector-valued functions, and Unit 10, infinite sequences and series — plus some extra topics inside Units 6–8. In plain terms, AB mirrors a first-semester college calculus course and BC spans the first and second. The prerequisites are comparable for both.

The exam, at a glance

The format is the same for AB and BC: two sections, each split into a no-calculator and a calculator part.

• Section I — 42 multiple-choice. Part A: 29 questions, 62 minutes, no calculator. Part B: 13 questions, 38 minutes, calculator required.
• Section II — 6 free-response. Part A: 2 questions, 30 minutes, calculator required. Part B: 4 questions, 60 minutes, no calculator.

Both exams sit on Monday, 10 May 2027. For what changes in 2027 and what the calculator policy actually allows, we have separate pieces: the 2027 exam changes and Desmos on Bluebook.

A first-year timeline that works

Read the CED before the year, not during it. Finish the Course Audit early enough to get AP Classroom when it opens on 1 July. Lean on AP Classroom's unit guides for pacing and its question bank for tests — you do not have to write your first year of assessments from scratch. And when a lesson goes badly, the AP Community is full of people who taught it last year. The same steps, condensed to one printable page, are here.

What this guide does not claim to be

This is a map of College Board's own free resources, not a set of instructions on how to teach. Pedagogy is the part where a colleague beats an article every time. The CED, AP Classroom and the AP Summer Institutes are the authoritative places to go; this page just tells you the order to visit them in.

• Sources (all checked 10 October 2026): AP Central — Teaching AP for the First Time? (the six steps; AP Classroom opening, Course Audit, AP Community, Summer Institutes); AP Calculus AB course page (the eight units, their exam weightings, the Mathematical Practices, and the 2026-27 CED clarifications); AP Calculus AB exam page (the exam format, identical on the AP Calculus BC exam page); The Difference Between AP Calculus AB and BC (BC as a superset of AB, plus Units 9 and 10); 2027 AP Exam Dates (Calculus AB and BC on 10 May 2027).