AP Precalculus Premium, 2025: Prep Book with 3 Practice Tests + Comprehensive Review + Online Practice (Barron's AP Prep) Premium Edition

Since this is the first year that the AP Pre-Calculus exam is being taught and tested, I'm so glad that there is already a prep book available on the market. This one is really thorough and has a lot of practice problems and guides for things that are pretty new to the AP curriculum. Glad it's priced fairly and on the same scale as the other books instead of being marked way up since its new!

Useful and helpful

My son says it’s helpful

I taught Precalculus as a Pre-AP high school course for about 20 years. I'm retired now, but when I heard that Precalculus is now (2023-24) an AP course, I looked for a guide so that I could see what this new test was going to look like. I know -- once a nerd, always a nerd. Anyway, this is the only guide that I found, so I bought a copy and set about working my way through it.On the plus side, the book does contain good reviews of the 4 Units covered by the test. Also, since this is the first year for this test, there aren't a lot of practice problems available, and this guide does contain a lot of very useful problems that are both high-level and well-written.Now for the bad news:1) The book doesn't always make it clear when you are allowed to use a calculator and when you're not. Since much of the test does not allow use of technology, this is an important distinction that is missing.2) Some of the solutions are just wrong. In particular, nearly every problem on piecewise functions is worked incorrectly. At least one graph has the y-axis marked incorrectly. The latter can cause confusion, but the former is just dangerous.3) One hard and fast rule on AP math tests is that you never use intermediate rounding, which is rounding a number and then using that rounded number in another calculation. This undermines the accuracy of the answer, and yet it is done liberally throughout the guide. On the AP test, any answer that is not accurate to 3 decimal places is incorrect. There are ways to avoid intermediate rounding, and any guide to an AP math test should describe them and model them.Most students who plan to take the AP test will also take the corresponding AP class in high school. The teacher of that class can help a proactive student resolve the issues that I have cited here. For those students, the benefits of the additional problems in this book probably outweigh the liabilities of the errors and omissions. However, as a stand-alone guide, this book is woefully inadequate and misleading and should not be used.

Just as described, daughter is thrilled

So far, I’ve only taken the practice test and not throughly read the content review, but I just took a mock exam with my teacher that was from the official college board and the Barron’s practice test was pretty spot on. Just keep in mind that the practice test includes unit 4 (which isn’t tested) and has 48 questions instead of 40 like on the exam. Great book overall!

“Update” buried on the Barron website and justification after the fact about including it. Disingenuous because they would have flagged it VERY clearly in the book if that had been their original intent. They knew in time so the ‘new’ edition is over 1 year old.My daughter was so stressed out not knowing this - cramming to teach herself that material which was not taught in her AP class. The intent in giving her the book was to put her at ease about how much she knows and provide review for what she needs to brush up on. Not cause stress and loss of confidence in the days before. Every practice test is sprinkled with material from Unit 4 causing friction in that experience and she wasted time on the whole chapter. She diverted time on unit 4 vs focusing on the material that IS on the test tomorrow. Thankfully she knows it very well and will do well.See reviews by teachers below about other cautions and errors. Having said all that, armed with that information, it is probably fine, but I recommend Princeton Review for AP study guides. I will return it on principle and in protest of Barron’s obvious financially motivated decision to just put a lame “update” on their website that no one would look for and just push it off to the 2025 edition instead of fixing the ‘24 edition which was printed after knowing unit 4 material was not on the exam.Amazon delivered it in 2 days and the other AP study guides overnight. Amazon continues to fulfill our orders quickly and accurately and makes return so easy.

Well written, easy to understand. My son got a 5 on his AP Pre Calculus exam