I just did the F=ma exam and honestly, I knew how to do about five out of the twenty-five questions. I haven’t practiced with recent exams but just doing pre-2020 exams I have typically scored below thirteen. I have one more year so I have to seriously lock in. I’m taking a break from past exams for a while because I’ve unfortunately done most of them and remembered a lot of answers, which will hinder my practice. In addition, if I have serious underlying issues, it would be more beneficial for me to improve my basics first. So I started on the first chapter of Halliday Resnick Krane textbook. This feels like going back to square one since im reviewing the concepts I first learned. But, it is very important for my fundamentals to be strong. So I derived kinematic equations and did some calc based kinematic questions.
One major difference between this textbook and how I first learned physics is that this one is calculus-based. Before learning physics, I had not learned calculus; so naturally, I learned physics the algebra way. Reading the lectures made me realize that physics should not be taught with algebra. Every physical quantity is a derivative or integral of another. The basic kinematic formulas, what I initially struggled to memorize, were only simple differential equations. Algebra-based physics, how I first learned, is nonetheless stuffing formulas and memorization with no meaning nor understanding.