<p>I’m not sure if people want to read through this tale I’m going to weave, but reading these posts really wants to make me share my story. </p>
<p>The Advanced Placement classes at my school were not generally thought of as difficult my freshman year of high school and before that. That, of course, was until my 9th grade biology teacher decided to form her own AP Biology class. </p>
<p>I remember having to sign up for a spot in the class. The list was reviewed by my teacher for approval, then sent to the principal for what I guess was a second round of approval. The summer of 9th grade, our future AP Biology teacher gave us four chapters worth of homework. The reading was then to be followed by mandatory notes and end of chapter questions, both of which had to be near impeccable. This summer homework unintentionally weeded out some potential students. Little did my classmates, friends, and I know that this was only the beginning.</p>
<p>On the first day of the school year, we entered our new biology class and took a test on the reading. Very little people passed it. The first week of the class passed, and more people dropped the class. AP Bio gradually became a living hell. We had a chapter of reading everyday and 20 page reading guides to fill out, followed by reading quizzes the day after. Every now and then we took online AP Bio quizzes, which we were graded on. At first, the tests we took were 30 questions. The number progressively increased to 100 questions, with the inclusion of two FRQs. We had done all the labs, with the long lab reports to match. Small projects were casually thrown into the mix. </p>
<p>With the nearing of the official AP test, we took practice AP tests for 5 weeks every Saturday. </p>
<p>None of us were used to this amount of work, and there was not one student who did not have a mental breakdown. I cried my eyes out pretty often and so did about a half dozen others. Someone even had recurring panic attacks. We ate, breathed, and slept Bio. Wait a minute, we never slept! Sleep was a privilege, what with all those 15 page lab reports to write and reading guides to fill out. We all carried our heavy Bio books like we were carrying our children, and we just absolutely died if something happened to them. </p>
<p>I remember taking the AP Biology test, and thinking it was unbelievably simple when I was taking it. The same went for many others that were in my class, except for maybe a few people. The class, fortunately, mellowed out by the end of that test. We only really had this cool fetal pig dissection and a project about it. At the end of the year, the whole class made a scrapbook for posterity. It included tips for the incoming class, which never came because the course was taken out of the school’s curriculum. </p>
<p>Aside from all the horrible memories, we harnessed some good ones as well. These memories included the time we got the AP Bio shirts and sweaters the class designed, the time we got cool pens, etc. It was times like these when we realized that we had a love-hate relationship with Bio. The course turned us all into masochists (not in the physical/literal meaning, of course)…</p>
<p>No one in this class got an A or even an A-; the closest grade was an 89%. Many, however, passed the tests with 5s and 4s. </p>
<p>It is very difficult to capture the brutal monster that was AP Bio in a thread post, as some might think that it was a joke of a class by reading my brief description of it. One thing was clear to us all, the class must have been VERY messed up for us to think the test was easy. It even made classes we had after this one look like a walk in the park.</p>
<p>TL;DR… AP Biology was crazy as hell, it was pandemonium 2010-2011!</p>