<p>I'm taking AP Biology next year as a sophomore along with another AP class (but AP Biology is gonna be my main focus). I have some experience w/ AP classes (AP US History in particular, which I took last year) - so I guess I'm not completely clueless in the AP department, but I'm flipping through Bio textbook and everything seems overwhelming and overwhelmingly impossible.</p>
<p>Any advice..? Thanks</p>
<p>Oh geez, well…</p>
<p>If you had apush, than it wouldn’t have been the small print or heavy reading. It would have been the biology, and that’s bad. Hopefully, when you are actually in the class, things will look different.</p>
<p>may the force be with you</p>
<p>You shouldn’t memorize in the common sense that you get a list of biology words and study their definitions. Instead, focus on the major concepts, study these really well, and you’ll learn the definitions and applications of terms related to said concept. For example, you give me the concept of respiration, I’ll give you: glucose, ADP, ATP, mitochondria, protons, electron transport chain, cytochromes, NADH, FADH2, glycolyis, hexokinase, pyruvate, citric acid cycle, acetyl co-enzyme A, ATP-synthase, proton pump, concentration gradient, the list goes on. If you wanted, I could give you a definition for all these words with the role they play in respiration. But, I never just asked myself something like: what is the definition of hexokinase? and then ensued to look the term up in the glossary or text. I learned the contextual “definition” through learning about the process. </p>
<p>So, you definitely have to study. And pay attention to class lectures, which generally go through the broader processes with sufficient detail (at least for me). But you don’t have to memorize. Whereas in APUSH there isn’t much connecting most of the finer details, in biology there is a ton of overlay. Use this to your advantage.</p>
<p>^just my two cents. It worked pretty darn well for me. I remember being just as flustered when looking through my bio textbook before the year (technically, before introductory bio, but I still learned almost all that stuff above in that class anyways and probably could have gotten a 5 on the AP test had I taken it after that first bio course).</p>
<p>like gammagorzza said it’s not really about definitions; if you understand a concept, you’ll know the definitions of the things involved. the possibly worst thing you could do in this class is to try to learn definitions without context; in such a way you’ll be totally lost. but really this is a fun class…once you finally understand something you’re like ohhhhhhhh…i see how that works. =)
good luck!</p>