<p>I'm currently a junior in an uncompetitive public school, which offers only a few AP courses: AP Chem (took this year), AP Calculus AB (took this year), AP Eng Lit, AP Physics Mechanics and AP Bio (last 3 are offered at senior year).</p>
<p>I'm going to sign up for AP Physics (I don't have confident in taking AP Eng Lit, because English is not my native language, and I have been in an Eng environment for only 2 years), but I am also in a dilemma of whether to take AP Bio!</p>
<p>I have several reasons to NOT to take it:
① I heard there are tons of vocabulary terms in AP Bio to be memorized, which might be overwhelming for me;
② I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to get in pre-med or bio-related major; my tentative majors are engineering or business related (eg. Accounting)</p>
<p>But, there are also some reasons that I SHOULD take it:
① Taking an extra AP course is very possible to increase my chance in getting in a prestigious college.</p>
<p>WHAT SHOULD I DO, MY FELLOW C.C. WISE MEN AND WOMEN?
THANK YOU VERY MUCH IF YOU CAN GIVE ME SOME HELP!!!</p>
<p>I’m currently a rising junior and I took AP Bio my sophomore year.</p>
<p>You are correct about the massive amount of terms, but it really shouldn’t be something to be worried about. Although there are a lot of them, the topics covered are mostly basic (don’t forget AP Bio only covers first year college biology; a class you will have to take whether you major in pre-med or not). The AP test itself is also mostly pretty easy… it doesn’t require you to memorize really in-depth facts, only the basic summary of the various topics. Nevertheless, don’t forget that there is A LOT of information to learn.</p>
<p>If you took freshman biology (or some similar class), you should already be about a quarter way there in terms of preparation. For example, here is a question off of the test, courtesy of College Board:
Which of the following best describes an intimate ecological association in which
an organism benefits from living on or within a host, but which generally has a
negative effect on that host?
(a) Mutualism
(b) Saprophytism
(c) Commensalism
(d) Parasitism
(e) Predation</p>
<p>The answer is D. See? Pretty basic concepts that are, at most, knee-deep. </p>
<p>It’s a really interesting class, and I really recommend that you try to take it!</p>
<p>I took AP Bio this past year as a junior. There are a lot of terms, but they’re all easy to remember. You’ll be fine as long as you read the book. The AP exam is very easy since it doesn’t have very specific questions. Even the students that didn’t read (coughcough most of them) walked out of the exam confident that they got a good score. </p>
<p>It’ll also help your GPA is your school weights your grades ;)</p>
<p>Is that really a representative AP Bio question? I posed it to my 6th grader, who is a bright, but not exceptionally advanced, child and he knew the answer. My rising senior will be taking AP Bio this year.</p>
<p>You may not be doing pre-med etc. in college but most degrees require science as a general education course(s). If you pass if you’ll have that requirement out of the way. It’ll save time and dollars in the long run.</p>
<p>Taking three out of the five AP courses your school offers, two of them being science, will be plenty to indicate to the colleges that you are taking a challenging schedule. If you have three AP’s and another candidate has five, that is not going to be used to decide which of you to take.</p>
<p>@Joan52
Yes, it is. I took it off of the AP Biology Course Guide from College Board’s website. </p>
<p>“I posed it to my 6th grader, who is a bright, but not exceptionally advanced, child and he knew the answer.”
Of course. This was simply to make my point that the actual AP test is not really that difficult.</p>
<p>I think you should definitely take AP Biology, it’s such an interesting course if you can understand everything and link every topic together into a “big idea”. With that said, I have to warn you that there is A LOT of vocabulary to remember like differentiating between sporangia, sporophyte, sporocyte and sporophyll… darn plants ><
BUT IT WAS AN AWESOME COURSE!
I took it in grade 10, it wasn’t too bad</p>
<p>uh…guys its a random question… im going to be a senior next yr and i signed up for AP bio…but im scared of dissections…should i drop it and take AP physics instead??? or should i just take AP bio???</p>
<p>At my school if you are terrified of dissections, you are allowed to sit out for it. So you should ask your bio teacher if you could do that.
My advice: try it. You may not be as disgusted as you think you will be</p>
<p>@CantConcentrate
No, that is 100% not a representative question of AP bio. Please don’t make random stuff up. You and I both fully know that AP bio gets A LOT harder then that. So asking him a basic word question does not represent an appropriate AP bio class.</p>
<p>AP biology is a lot of reading(some of the stuffs are hard to understand), a lot of memorization about random facts, and a lot of homeworks. Not only is the reading loooooong but also super duper boring ~.~</p>