<p>I'm a senior in high school. I am taking AP Biology right now. I am planning to major in General Biology in college. However, I have an F in Biology and I don't find Biology interesting. There are so many concepts to remember!! Argh! When I study my AP Bio notest, nothing goes through my head. I can't remember much is what I'm saying. I mean I do like Biology but just not AP. If you ask me, I don't know why I'm planning to major in Biology especially since I'm not passionate about it..but I guess the simple answer is I need to take Biology to get prepare for becoming a dentist. I know it sounds stupid..but that is the reason why I'm planning to major in Biology. So..I was wondering if Biology in college is the same as AP Biology? or, do they teach more topics that we haven't learned in AP Biology?</p>
<p>You don’t have to major in bio. You only need, what, 3 semesters of biology to meet dental school pre-requisites? You will, however, have to tough it out and actually excel in your classes if you want any shot. Most universities pre-med/dental/pharm classes(like bio) are weeder classes to separate the men from the boys(or the women from the girls). If you cannot motivate yourself to succeed in AP bio, you might want to change your goals a bit.</p>
<p>If you don’t like AP Bio you prolly won’t like Biology. Is there something you like especially in Biology? </p>
<p>AP Bio and College Bio are similar in terms of what you learn. You really go in depth into the stuff in AP Bio.</p>
<p>My friend is on the Kinesiology Pre-Health Professional-Pre Dental track. Most science majors will work, but you might have to take additional sciences as electives as part of the pre-dental program (in my friends case - Organic Chemistry I & II and Calculus).</p>
<p>I think Ap Biology is a little different than the college course.</p>
<p>AP Bio will almost always be much easier than college bio. My college intro bio class went into more depth and greater breadth than my AP bio class.</p>
<p>As far as I know, you don’t need to be a science major to go to dent school. And if you’re doing poorly in biology and don’t find it very interesting, you may wanter consider a different career path. Introductory bio isn’t just an isolated hurdle you need to get to dent school. The first two years of dent school are all biology.</p>
<p>college bio is generally harder, deeper (and more classes for different areas of bio), and much more interesting</p>
<p>Our son took both. I just asked him and he said that AP Bio was a lot more work. His AP Bio teacher was a college professor, research biologist and worked in industry. She expected the student to do about 3-4 hours of homework per day. Biology is a massive amount of memorization so it works out well if you’re good at doing that.</p>
<p>My college bio class was MUCH easier than my AP class. The questions weren’t nearly as specific. I didn’t have to read the book or anything. Just read the notes before the test and I aced the class.</p>
<p>Twilight-Girl, aren’t you failing some other class too? I think I remember you posting something in the college admissions forum…</p>
<p>you have an F in high school Bio and you don’t find it interesting, but you want to dedicate 4 years of your life to studying it?! If you’re getting an F in the high school class, how are you going to handle the advanced coursework in college? And even if you can handle it and just have senioritis or something, why would you pick a major you’re totally bored by? You’ll have to study it for 4 years straight. And yep, of course the stuff you’ll learn over the course of 4 years is going to be more than a 1-year HS class! A high school class isn’t equivalent to a Bachelor’s in Biology. </p>
<p>Imagine studying Bio day after day, semester after semester, class after class, year after year - would you like that? would you be able to handle that? Then you’ll be studying it again in Dental school. Anyway you don’t have to pick Bio to be a Dentist, you can find a major not even related to science. But you’ll end up doing Bio anyway as a Dental student.</p>
<p>This is like someone saying, “I hate Economics and I have an F in HS Economics. Should I be an Econ major and try to become an Economist?” It’s your choice, but it kind of seems like an obvious no to me (not Dentist school, but a Bio major)</p>
<p>Well it depends on where you go to college. Here at Tufts, the Intro bio course was LIGHTYEARS harder than AP Bio. =/</p>
<p>My AP biology teacher goes very in depth. We were required to memorize all of the names of the enzymes and reacts in the process of cellular respiration, just to give an example (phosphofructokinase; nuff said). The questions are extremely specific and require extensive reading of the textbook. </p>
<p>She’s told us that it’s way more in depth than college biology will be, and girls who have graduated and come back to visit have confirmed that fact. I think it depends on the teacher you have in your AP Bio course.</p>
<p>But in general, college biology will be covering the same things you covered in high school, just in a different way. I’m a total bio geek and intend to major in it, but if you don’t like biology now I don’t recommend you make it your major.</p>
<p>Memorising the names of the phosphorylated sugars and the other intermediates of glycolysis is useless if you have no idea what’s really going on. Plus what are you going to use that knowledge for at that stage?</p>
<p>To me, that’s just additional difficulty for no additional reason, as long as you haven’t studied organic chemistry. A serious study of chemical structure (ab initio, not that AP Chem crap), and orgo is when things start really making sense, because you start knowing why chemical reactions occur the way they do, with their characteristic stereochemistry, and why an enzyme might want to carry out a particular reaction. You know what happens to the Gibbs free energy and the HOMO-LUMO gap and so forth. Knowing what functional groups get substituted where has much more intuition for the student (radical stability, carbocation stability, solvent effects, etc.).</p>
<p>Worse is if you have to start memorising all the cytochrome complexes. Seriously – there are some things that aren’t useful yet if you don’t allow the other subjects (like I don’t know … biochemistry and protein/enzyme reactions?) to catch up. </p>
<p>More stuff to memorise != learning more</p>
<p>Agreed with galoisien. I had to memorize all the intermediates, reactions, enzyme names and such for my biochem class. A lot of the reactions wouldn’t have made sense had I not taken organic chem first. It is completely pointless for an AP bio or intro bio class to force you to memorize that stuff.</p>