Calculus on the PCAT

[Hockeyfannus]

For those of you who took the PCAT in June/Aug, what kind of calculus questions did you see? One of my friends told me that Reimann Sum was on there...

Thanks!

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[eric4321]

"If f(x) is ____ and g(x) is ____, then g(f(x)) is __answer__ ?" Several of those.

Estimate the area under a curve using rectangles. Ours were centered, you might have to do left-corner or right-corner method. I didn't know how to do this but managed to guess 2 of them correctly because they had 3 bad answer choices each.

If you're stuck, try the answers & see if they are even possible. If you can do that in 1 minute or less it's a good test strategy.

Note: I saw Algebra questions & answers that were a direct copy from the Kaplan practice test. Didn't understand them either [I tested out of every math subject except Trig & Calculus way back in Jan '06] but pretty sure i guessed those right too.

You can answer a LOT of math questions quickly & correctly if you know the 6 basic Trig functions and how to draw them on an x-y plot. Like know how to graph "y=sin x" and also "y=3sin x + 5" and so on.

 

[hmmmmm]

"If f(x) is ____ and g(x) is ____, then g(f(x)) is __answer__ ?" Several of those.

so (f o g) type of questions?

what about

if f(x) is _______ and g(x) is ______, f(x) = ___, then g'(_)^-1 = ?

Estimate the area under a curve using rectangles. Ours were centered, you might have to do left-corner or right-corner method. I didn't know how to do this but managed to guess 2 of them correctly because they had 3 bad answer choices each.

do they give you the formula?

should one bother to remember them or just eye ball it?

thanks

 

[eric4321]

Eye-balled the rectangles. Gave up on at least one, but 2 other questions i could just cross out the bad answers. A = too small for even one rectangle, B = too big to fit under the highest point on the curve, and so on.

For details you'd want to ask someone who studied Quantitative more. My lucky guesses and bubbling all 48 answers probably took me from a 46 to my actual score of 76.

No matter what you want to bring a stopwatch and keep skipping to the fast, easy questions. Don't panic if you've skipped 10 out of the first 24 questions because i skipped that many & it turned out okay.

 

[Toomeke]

skip around...if you don't know it off the top of your head...SKIP IT and come back to it...answer all the ones you KNOW first, then the ones you can narrow down to 50/50, then guess on the rest...

you don't have time to sit there and calculate - just not possible...auto-eliminate obviously wrong answers and work on 50/50 answers for less than a minute...if no answer - GUESS!

das what I did and I hadn't taken calc yet in aug and got a 78.