<p>I heard they're doing this for all AP science exams this year, since I heard the AP Chem exam was harder than usual also? What a conspiracy..</p>
<p>Errr.... no. I took both Bio and Chem and can say quite confidently that Chem was much easier. Both had fairly tough MC but the FRQ on Chem were ridiculously easy, at least for me. Bio's FRQs were ok but some (#2) involved some amount of BSing.</p>
<p>"so who thinks there's going to be a slightly more generous curve on this test than on past tests?</p>
<p>by the way, to those of you who thought the test was pretty hard/extremely hard... did you guys actually think you'd breeze through the test? i'm trying to figure out if the test was just naturally hard even for people who were made for HYPS or if some of us just have crummy teachers."</p>
<p>shrug, I breezed through every practice test, official past released exams and Cliffs tests with no problem, but had a hard time with this one.</p>
<p>w/e, I still got a 5 probably</p>
<p>Why did so many people thing think it was so hard?</p>
<p>After all, it's AP Biology, not honors, or whatever. I think everything on the MC and free response were covered in the our class. Anyway, the free-response was such a joke compared to last year's, and the MC was decent.</p>
<p>I expected the test to be much harder. I won't complain.</p>
<p>To look at it from the perspective of an AP Bio teacher... they get so much crap. Yet, it is pretty hard to cover all of those subjects for the AP exam, especially to unmotivated seniors. Actual AP exam multiple choice tests are rarely released, and they looked pretty different from the exam. It isn't like AP Gov where they ask questions on the same terms every year.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, I'd have to say my AP Bio teacher is definitely the best out there. Nature man and a great guy that genuinely cares about you as a person.</p>
<p>About the AP exam, its smart for the sake of their graders that they only had a couple pages of answer space for each answer rather than a book with like 30 clean pages. Some people can go on and on about biology.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Why did so many people thing think it was so hard?</p>
<p>After all, it's AP Biology, not honors, or whatever. I think everything on the MC and free response were covered in the our class. Anyway, the free-response was such a joke compared to last year's, and the MC was decent.</p>
<p>I expected the test to be much harder. I won't complain.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>We didn't cover everything. We went slowly through cell stuff and DNA replication, etc. Then the fires came, pushing us back a week. By the end of January we knew we were f'ed if we didn't hurry up (we were only on cell communication!) and then rushed through botany, evolution, and physiology. Didn't even cover behavior and barely touched phylogeny and all that crap.</p>
<p>I would've breezed through it if it had covered more DNA/cell stuff. But instead it had a lot of botany and other obscure stuff that I didn't have a strong foundation of knowledge in.</p>
<p>It wasn't like the prep books. Well not Barron's. Cliffs is ok with mimicking the actual test.</p>
<p>i studied all the wrong things for this exam..
-mastered cell respiration & photosynthesis & barely any questions were on them
-skimmed plants briefly which was stupid since a whole frq was about plants
-went over all the labs EXCEPT for the one on the exam</p>
<p>meili:
me too! i was afraid that they would ask a photosynthesis/respiration frq! b/c they havent asked it in a while & its pretty common! omg! im so mad! i didnt even finish the frq! im such a moron! </p>
<p>im not taking ap bio. i bought the lab manual online from collegeboard. it sucks! its so confusing! i studied chi squared and all that *&^$^ and they weren't on the test!</p>
<p>They should split the exam into Molecular/Cell Biology and Organism/Ecology Biology imo and let you choose</p>
<p>Yay, we can talk about the exam freely now...</p>
<p>Ok, so can someone explain FRQ #2 to me? Something about dissolved oxygen...?</p>
<p>gross primary productivity is the total amount of photosynthesis occuring before taking into account O2 used in respiration. measured by adding net primary productivity + respiration usage. (net O2 gained during the day + O2 loss at night)</p>
<p>net primary productivity is the net amount of oxygen gained during the day when both photosynthesis and respiration are taking place.</p>
<p>respiration rate is measured at night, where there is no light for photosynthesis.</p>
<p>productivity goes down as depth increases because less light reaches the bottom.</p>
<p>not sure about the midsummer one.</p>
<p>what was the answer to plant self-fertilization?</p>
<p>Hmm, from what I can remember....</p>
<p>The one about fertilization (roughly) goes like this...
Pollen grains are produced in microsporangium, eggs are produced from megasporangium. When the pollen grain is released, it travels to the stigma of the flower. There, it grows a pollen tube down the style, to the ovule. The grain reelases 2 sperm - one fertilizes the egg (making a zygote) and the other combines with a large cell to create the endosperm. This is called double fertilization.</p>
<p>ALOT more details are needed in that answer... that's just the lame-man's terms of it.</p>
<p>The question about self-incompatibility: Basically (i'm too lazy to get my Bio book) if a pollen grain has certain alleles that match the egg, the pollen tube won't grow, thus fertilization cannot occur.</p>
<p>Why this is an evolutionary advantage? Well, genetic variation is always a plus [insert Darwinian explanation about natural selection here]</p>
<p>danggggggggg. I couldnt think of one way that plants prevented self fertilization so I said that some plants only have an ovary and some only have anthers...and then I said in some plants the anthers are beneath the style so they can't get into the ovary. dang dang dang. Why does it take so long to get our scores??? Seriously it's going to bother me so bad because I'm worried I didn't get a 5 :(. I did good on essays 1 and 3, okay on 2, and I'll be happy with three points for number 4.</p>
<p>boooo to plant reproduction!!</p>
<p>It's okay - I only know that because it was one of the last chapters we went over. I merely got lucky :P</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>[ol]
[<em>]Your school has to collect all the books at the end of this week, pack them up, and ship them back to ETS.
[</em>]ETS has to unpack the test materials from approximately 6,500 testing sites. The answer sheets go in one pile, the essay books in another, etc., etc. Each item has to be carefully checked to make sure everything needed arrived from each testing site. Essay books that are missing labels, names, etc., have to be dealt with before they can be sorted and sent back out.
[<em>]The approximately 2.6 million test books have to be sorted by subject and repacked.
[</em>]The repacked books are shipped to their essay reading site (Kansas City for Biology).
[<em>]The readers need to train on the rubrics and then read all 500,000 biology essays (4 per book).
[</em>]All the scored have to be recombined -- essay and MC -- and cutpoints calculated.
[<em>]Scores need to be organized and sent to colleges, who receive them on July first (one college wanted to know if they could get scores in May). This means that check need to be made to make sure that all the tests taken by one student show up on one score report -- especially difficult if ID lablels have been shared/switched.
[</em>]At that point, student reports can be printed and mailed. For a fee, they're willing to give you your score on the phone if you can't wait the extra week.
[/ol]</p>
<p>And that's why it takes so long to get the scores. :)</p>
<p>idk i didn't think the test was that hard at all...i don't think i left any of the mc's blank and the frq's weren't that bad (a lot of my classmates-seniors-throught they were though). it's funny cause i got that #2 frq (ecology) because it was on the SAT II for Biology lol. Overall, much easier than the Bio Olympiad though. Hopefully a 5 for me :)</p>
<p>Yeah srsly *** this was an ecology/organism test not a biology test! Excluded all the interesting stuff like DNA tech, cell resp, photosynth, evolution, etc. Omg!</p>
<p>@BigIs: lol, the way you wrote that almost makes me feel sympathetic for ETS and the College Board :D</p>