<p>I am currently self-studying for AP biology. The problem is that my school already offers the AP biology course which I am not enrolled in. Am I still allowed to take the AP bio test? I asked my guidance counselor and she was no help. She said that I am not allowed to take the test but I am hoping that she misheard my question since she's like 90 years old.</p>
<p>Well, you may be stuck with your district policies…but NO you don’t have to be enrolled in a course. I homeschool my kids and they take the tests up at the public schools, but are not enrolled in the classes there. Several districts around here allow their students to self-study and try and take them. However, your district may not. I would suggest taking a couple of practice AP exams from books and seeing how you do. If you are scoring at least a 3 as of now, then I would go to see your counselor again. Tell her that you have been studying hard and have a good possiblity of earning at least a 4. You might even tell her that you would be willing to meet with the Biology teacher after school sometimes to go over your progress. One problem you may be running into is that they may be afraid that you will ruin their scores. They don’t want someone earning a 1 and going into their stats. Does that make sense? I hope that helps.</p>
<p>PS I hope you had a better attitude than the you are 90 years old and don’t know what you are talking about when you actually talked to her. Smart alecks don’t get anywhere with me and wouldn’t persuade me to let them take the test!</p>
<p>Thank you for the response. And she really is very old haha, but I like her and she is generally very helpful. Also, I’ve been studying a lot (at least 8-12 hours a week since December with a lot of background from biology honors) and I don’t think the possibility of my getting a bad score is what they’re worried about. I am an excellent test taker and apparently, our faculty/school is so bad that only 2 students among the rest of the AP biology class scored above a 2 last year.</p>
<p>Hopefully, I will be able to convince her to allow me to take a test if she understood me the first time. But would such district policies preventing students from self-studying for AP tests exist? To me, they just sound like attempts to take away our opportunities to challenge ourselves.</p>
<p>Yeah, like the poster above said, you don’t have to take the course. If they don’t let you take it at your school, you could ask another high school if you can take it there, my friend did that once and she said that it was no problem. I guess it depends one the state/school though…</p>