A 32-Week AP Calculus Pacing Guide

What this pacing guide assumes

This plan assumes a single period, five days a week, for a full school year, with 32 weeks of teaching time landing before the AP Calculus exam and the remaining weeks absorbed by the usual first days, breaks, and testing interruptions a school calendar adds on its own. A block schedule with fewer, longer meetings should compress the week counts below by roughly a third rather than stretch the topics; the topic order and the checkpoints do not change.

Every week below names the unit and the Course and Exam Description topic numbers it covers, then points at the page on the site built for that exact content: a unit page for the full method, a guide for a single skill worth isolating, or an interactive for the one idea that is easier to see move than to read. Nothing here replaces a textbook's problem sets; it tells you which week each problem set belongs in and which page to assign alongside it.

The plan below is for AP Calculus AB. A dedicated section further down covers what changes for BC: the same 32 weeks, the same AB units, and two more units fit in by compressing the run rather than by adding time nobody has.

Weeks 1 through 2: Unit 1, Limits and Continuity

Unit 1 is 10 to 15 percent of the AB exam, and its real content is a decision procedure, not a list of rules: given a limit, substitute first, then read the form you get back to choose a technique. Two weeks is enough time to build that habit if the first week stays graphical and numerical and the second week moves to algebra.

The Intermediate Value Theorem is the unit's one existence theorem and the first place students meet an argument that proves something exists without constructing it. Its counterexamples page is built for exactly that gap: every hypothesis it drops shows a picture where the conclusion fails.

Weeks 3 through 5: Unit 2, Differentiation: Definition and Fundamental Properties

Unit 2 is another 10 to 15 percent, and it is where a limit becomes a derivative. The unit works best taught in the order it is written: the definition first, so nobody reaches for the power rule before they have seen why it is true, then the rules themselves.

Topic 2.4, where differentiability implies continuity but continuity does not imply differentiability, is a favorite multiple choice trap. The counterexample writeup shows the corner and cusp cases that make the one direction fail.

Weeks 6 through 8: Unit 3, Composite, Implicit, and Inverse Functions

Unit 3 carries only 5 to 10 percent on its own, but the chain rule inside it shows up embedded in every unit that follows, so a class that leaves this unit shaky pays for it in units 4, 6, 7, and 8 as much as here.

Give a mixed derivative quiz at the end of week 8, one that forces a student to choose the rule rather than telling them which rule to use. If that quiz comes back weak, the fix belongs here, before Unit 4 buries the same skill inside a word problem.

Weeks 9 through 11: Unit 4, Contextual Applications of Differentiation

Unit 4 is 10 to 15 percent, and it is the first unit where the derivative has to mean something instead of just existing. Related rates is the unit's hardest skill because it demands a diagram and an equation before any differentiating starts.

Weeks 12 through 15: Unit 5, Analytical Applications of Differentiation

Unit 5 is the heaviest differentiation unit on the exam, 15 to 18 percent, and the one with the most named theorems in a row: Mean Value, Extreme Value, First Derivative, Second Derivative, Candidates. Four weeks is not generous for that list; it is the minimum that lets each test get its own day before students start swapping them.

Curve sketching, where a student has to read f prime and f double prime graphs and reconstruct f, is the single most common place this unit runs long. If week 14 needs a sixth day, take it from week 15's implicit relations coverage rather than from the theorem days; 5.12 is the lightest tested piece of the unit.

Weeks 16 through 20: Unit 6, Integration and Accumulation of Change

Unit 6 is the heaviest unit on the exam at 15 to 20 percent, ahead of Unit 5's 15 to 18, and it is the longest unit in this plan for a reason: it introduces the definite integral, proves the Fundamental Theorem twice over, and then hands students a menu of antidifferentiation techniques to choose between. Five weeks is the floor, not a cushion.

The Riemann sums guide is worth assigning as review reading in week 16 alongside the interactive; the guide gives the algebra a substitute or a student working ahead cannot get from dragging the slider alone.

Weeks 21 through 23: Unit 7, Differential Equations

Unit 7 is only 6 to 12 percent of the AB exam (6 to 9 percent on BC), and its content is short enough that three weeks covers it with room for a slower Unit 8 to follow.

Weeks 24 through 27: Unit 8, Applications of Integration

Unit 8 is 10 to 15 percent and the last new content before review, which makes it the unit most likely to get squeezed by a slow Unit 6. It is also almost entirely visual, which makes it a good place to recover pace if an earlier unit ran long, since the interactive can carry a full class period on its own.

Weeks 28 through 32: cumulative review

Five weeks of review is what is left once units 1 through 8 take their 27 weeks out of 32. Spend it on retrieval and exam mechanics, not on reteaching content a student is meeting for the first time; anything that surfaces as genuinely new at this point belongs in a one-on-one conversation, not a whole-class reteach.

The BC addition: fitting units 9 and 10 into the same 32 weeks

BC does not get extra weeks; it gets a tighter run through the AB content so that units 9 and 10 fit inside the same 32 week frame. The two units are not small: Unit 9 is 10 to 15 percent of the BC exam and Unit 10 is 17 to 18 percent, close to a fifth of the whole exam by itself.

• Compress weeks 1 through 20 above by roughly five weeks. The clearest places to take that time: one week out of Unit 1 (BC students meet limits with less scaffolding), one out of Unit 3 (BC classes usually move faster through the chain rule the second time they touch it inside related rates), one out of Unit 5's four weeks (drop to three by combining the Mean Value and Extreme Value Theorem days), and two out of Unit 6's five weeks by teaching integration by parts, partial fractions, and improper integrals, the three BC-only additions to 6.11 through 6.13, alongside u-substitution in the same week rather than as separate reteach days.
• That leaves roughly 22 weeks for units 1 through 8 instead of AB's 27, with week 23 onward open for units 9 and 10.
• Weeks 23 through 27 (5 weeks): Unit 9, Parametric Equations, Polar Coordinates, and Vector-Valued Functions, topics 9.1 through 9.9. Site resource: the Unit 9 page and parametric and polar calculus.
• Weeks 28 through 31 (4 weeks): Unit 10, Infinite Sequences and Series, topics 10.1 through 10.15, the second largest topic count of any unit on either exam, one behind Unit 1's sixteen. Site resource: the Unit 10 page, which convergence test for choosing among the tests, the ratio test for 10.8, and Taylor and Maclaurin series for 10.11 through 10.14.
• Week 32: one week of cumulative review across all ten units, using the AP Calculus BC cram sheet instead of the AB version. A single week is thin; a BC class that is behind should take the time from Unit 10's error bound topics, 10.10 and 10.12, before it takes time from the review week.

The honest tradeoff: an AB class gets five weeks of cumulative review and a BC class gets one, because BC has forty percent more content to cover in the same calendar. That is why BC classes lean harder on daily retrieval built into the unit weeks themselves rather than saving it for the end.

Where classes fall behind, and what to cut

The same four places eat extra days in almost every section that runs this plan. Knowing them ahead of time is most of the fix, since a teacher who expects a slow week can plan the cut in advance instead of making it in a panic in May.

• Unit 3, the chain rule stacked three and four layers deep. This is the single most common place a class needs an extra day, because implicit differentiation in week 7 exposes chain rule gaps that looked fine in week 6. Budget the extra day here rather than assuming it will resolve itself in Unit 4.
• Unit 5, curve sketching from a first and second derivative graph (5.8 to 5.9). This is a reading skill, not a computation, and it does not respond to more practice problems the way the rest of the unit does; it responds to more graphs. If the unit is short a day, add it to week 14, not week 12 or 13.
• Unit 6, choosing an antidifferentiation technique (6.14). Students who can execute u-substitution or integration by parts in isolation still freeze when a problem does not announce which one to use. This is the unit's actual final exam question, and it deserves the last day of week 20 even if something upstream had to give a day to get there.
• For BC classes, Unit 10's convergence tests (10.4 to 10.9), where six tests arrive in six topics and a class needs a full week just to stop defaulting to the ratio test on every problem.

When a day has to come from somewhere, take it from the review phase first, in this order: drop week 32's discussion questions before dropping any diagnostic; run the review games in week 30 as a homework choice rather than a class day before shortening week 29's warm up cycle; and only shorten the units 1 through 4 review in week 29 last, since those are the units students touched longest ago and forget fastest. Never take the day from a new content week to protect a review week; a class that is behind in June with solid Unit 6 and 8 content will still pass more multiple choice questions than a class that finished on time with a shaky Unit 6.