<p>The last AP exam I took was in 2005 so I’m probably not the best resource but I generally did no self studying outside of taking one practice exam a week the month leading up to test since our exams weren’t the same timing/format as an AP. I never took AP Physics (at my school, it was literally impossible to take more than 2 AP sciences so I went with bio and chem). For bio and chem, my baseline score (i.e. the first practice test I took) was a 5. They used to sell the free response questions for teachers to purchase and my AP chem teacher purchased them every single year so my entire class would get a packet of literally decades worth of questions. No one got less than a 5 in that class, even the kids who weren’t getting As in the class.</p>
<p>When I was in high school, our physics teacher was a former college professor whose post doc work was part of a nobel prize winning team (he’s not one of the people named as a winner but his work contributed to his boss winning it). I doubt those kids needed a lot of outside work to learn the material for the exam.</p>
<p>For my other standardized tests (SAT, MCAT, USMLE Step 1), I have found test prep materials to be very useful.</p>
<p>Again for reference, 2 years ago 1 kid from your school went to Brown. I think now my school sends about 1/3 of the class to the ivy league, and that’s declined from where it was ~10 years ago right before the college application numbers exploded (Brown currently gets twice as many applications as when I applied).</p>