<p>I've heard that AP Bio is significantly easier than intro Bio at real colleges. Specifically, somewhere on this site, someone said that at MIT, a whole year of AP Bio is covered within the first 2 weeks of Bio 101. Is this true? Because at my school, AP Bio was a helluva lot of work, and that MIT thing is kind of scaring me!</p>
<p>AP bio (and every AP class for that matter) is SO much easier than the intro bio class I took in college, which was a huge weedout course for bio and biochem majors, and curved so 50% got crappy grades in the C/D/F range - in AP bio, most people got A’s and B’s if they worked hard enough, and it wasn’t too hard to get a 4 or 5 on the exam. </p>
<p>the only AP class I thought compared to an actual college level class was World History, because my teacher just made it really hard, so the history classes I took in college didn’t seem too hard in comparison.</p>
<p>Nowadays they like to make the intro science courses “weed out” classes so profs like to stuff a whole bunch of extra info that wasn’t covered in AP bio into what’s learned in class. </p>
<p>I don’t really think it was that much harder. I think the only difference is the amount of info you need to retain, at least in my experience.</p>
<p>They don’t compare, which is why most “high ranking universities” don’t accept ap credit for bio.</p>
<p>My ap bio certainly didn’t compare to the intro bio class.</p>
<p>^ It is unclear what you mean by “don’t compare.”</p>
<p>^In terms of rigor and material covered, ap bio was a joke compared to my intro bio class.</p>
<p>It depends on the school. I sat in on an intro bio class at UGA and didn’t think it was even AP level. (Which is not a knock against the school–if I had gone there, I would not have, nor should I have, taken that course.) On the other hand, I sat in on a similar class at Chicago a few weeks earlier and was completely and utterly lost.</p>
<p>The rigor of AP classes across different schools also varies widely, of course.</p>
<p>In any decent intro bio course, mastery of the conceptual framework is assumed. When you take an exam, you should expect questions that evaluate your ability to apply those concepts to novel situations while simultaneously testing your attention to detail. That’s the only way to have like 300 smart kids not all be gettings As.</p>
<p>Alright, thanks for clearing this up you guys!</p>
<p>Johns Hopkins is a top university, yet it will award 8 credits for a 4/5 on AP Bio exam</p>
<p>Consider a typical science class at Berkeley where about 500+ students have taken an honors/AP bio class in high school. Clearly not everyone who scored a 5 will replicate their outcome at Berkeley because this is not consistent with the reality of the harsh grade distribuition. Therefore Bio1A the introductory biology class at Berkeley is designed in a way to distinguish between mediocre and stellar students who not only excelled in AP classes but will also excell in college. Most college bio classes also supplement the lecture with mandatory lab. The lab is very different from the format you’re used to in high school. For example, the lab at my school exposes you to wet lab techniques, chordate diversity, bioinformatics, dissection, followed by a year end lab practical exam. Now you may wonder what are the benefits if at all of having taken AP Bio in preparation for college. My school uses the same Campbell textbook for Bio1A so that is one advantage, but most students find that having taken AP bio at least gives them an edge over those who have not, albeit such separation diminishes after the first year or so.</p>
<p>Top universities need to weed out the stragglers to maintain their college reputation. It all depends on how you rank [what part of the bell curve are you on] among other intelligent folks in biology.</p>
<p>AP anything is generally equivalent to a community college level class. Top universities will generally make the classes much harder to weed out students.</p>
<p>Sorry if this is a noob question, but are most college classes graded on a bell curve, or graded as they are in high school, independent of the other kids’ performances?</p>
<p>definitely bell curve. it ain’t high school anymore.</p>
<p>Most are graded on a bell curve or shewed bell curve.</p>
<p>So for those who have not taken Statistics and have little to no idea how a “bell curve” is used to calculate your overall grade in college here is some insight.</p>
<p>Generally speaking, a large class will produce test scores in the range 0%-100%, distributed somewhat like a hill, or a bell shape. This distribution or histogram is smoothed
into a normal curve because the large number of students allow for this calculation. Now everyone knows what an average is, but the normal curve takes into greater consideration the median, or the score above which 50% of the students did better or worse than everyone else. Why? This is where the standard deviation comes in. SD measures the spread of the normal curve, so a flatter valley curve means that there are more variation in the scores on a test. When you hear about 1 SD, it is referring to the cutoff % of students for which roughly 68% of the scores are earned. For example: OChem Final 100 Median 55 SD 15. So 68% of the students scored between 40-70. Your professors then assign a grade distribution based on the raw data not factoring regrades.
Some exceptions to this are:
exams that produced grossly skewed results that do not fit a normal curve
exams that net medians close to 80-90% in which there is ceiling effect
exams for which Professors have predetermined the % of students earning As and Bs</p>
<p>Not all classes are graded on a bell curve per se, but most are graded on some form of a curve. </p>
<p>And some classes do have down-curving… I had a class last fall that required somewhere around a 96.5 to get an A-</p>
<p>However, there are some classes that work on a flat scale that you know beforehand. My physics class was the standard 90+ is an A, 80-90 a B, etc.</p>
<p>Then there are the classes where they’ll give a general grading scale (90+ is an A, etc) but the teacher may curve it later on if they so choose (in a way that won’t hurt you. ie they may lower the cutoff for an A to an 88).</p>
<p>College biology typically has a lab at a separate meeting time. </p>
<p>Also, my biology professor adjusted his grades so that there was a perfect bell curve.</p>
<p>I do not know about MIT and such, D’s first Bio at state school was significantly more challenging than her AP Bio (“5” ), resulting in good number of honors students falling out of pre-med track. They had 3 profs in classroom at every lecture, each teaching their specialty. Class is known to be weed out killer. All following Bio classes were even harder and used background from first Bio class.</p>