<p>It is not always up to the professor, some college’s departments have requirements that certain interval of students must get a letter grade.</p>
<p>I find that AP Biology tests heavily on memorization while college Intro Bio courses stress less on memorization and more on concepts. However, this can also depend on your professor.</p>
<p>This conceptual testing may or may not be a good thing, and from my experience, this tends to ruin many, many students, which is why the averages for these classes tend to be pretty low. I personally like the concepts better than rote memorization as the latter took too much brain power and is inefficient as well as impractical, but testing concepts is difficult in that it requires actual thinking and reasoning. It also means there may be many opportunities for curveball questions thrown at you.</p>
<p>I was initially scared of the Intro to Bio class because the AP Bio nightmares back in high school. But I liked it much better in college because there is definitely much less busy work in rote memorization. Know the concepts and you will do fine. This sounds relatively simple, but most people fail to do this!</p>
<p>Oh, and also, I find that for most science college courses, almost all the stuff tested are from the lectures and you don’t even need to refer to the textbook if you understand lecture material.</p>
<p>Our intro science courses that I’ve taken have all been on an absolute scale–Intro Chem, Physics, and Materials Science (not required to take Bio).</p>