Advice for AP Bio (probably applicable to other exams as well)

[SeekingUni]

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@SeekingUni

Biology
Bottom line: The CLASS can be difficult and challenging, depending on your teacher and your school schedule, but the exam is a piece of cake, provided you know your material.</p>

<p>Throughout the year: It takes quite a bit of concentration to read Campbell’s a few hours per week and really grasp the concepts. With such short school years, it’s even harder to cover all the material and you just never know what will be asked on the exam. I could only answer one of three parts on a particular FRQ this year because we hadn’t covered a specific concept. I briefly studied it myself, but I didn’t go into the depth required to answer this particular question. Therefore, throughout the school year, you should really learn the concepts and information (bio is just pure facts; no major themes, ideas, etc. like World History) using an in-depth source such as Campbell’s Biology (text book). Don’t just teach yourself from a review guide, because if you learn just the bare minimum and factor in memory decay (forgetting), then you don’t know all you need to know for the exam. But if you learn more than enough and forget some, then you can still know plenty for the exam.</p>

<p>How to review: It’s rather simple if you’ve kept up with the class throughout the year: Read Cliff’s from cover-to-cover the weekend before the exam. Cliff’s is the best review for AP Bio and it is AWESOME. It’s very easy to read in a weekend (the AP bio exam is always on a Monday), and it doesn’t leave you feeling like you crammed. Also very helpful for me was to take some of the released exams (I took four of them). They really do give you a good idea of what’s coming up on the exam, and you can also see how you do. I scored consistently on all four of them throughout my various stages of studying, so I feel pretty confident that I did just as well on the actual exam. Also sit down and attempt FRQs from previous years (available on the CB website). Act as if you’re in the actual exam and write ALL you can. Then use the scoring rubrics to see what kind of points you’d earn. This will help you learn whether or not you need to go into more detail in your responses, and will help you see what kinds of things can get you points.

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