<p>hey guys, what do you think will be the most likely topics to be free responses? Overall, I know the course pretty well, I just want to make sure I know the free responses.</p>
<p>I see my google drive link is being passed around now…</p>
<p>I am taking it down temporarily for legal reasons</p>
<p>@ChaosLegend wait you’re the guy at Brown who made it? ah im sorry!</p>
<p>@satman111 The topics will most likely include something on graphing, most likely photosynthesis, and then ask you to explain it. That way they don’t test on exact steps of photosynthesis. Definetly something on Hardy-Weinberg, genetics, math based problems. Maybe a long essay or some short ones on really vague ecology topics. In the practice test, if you didn’t grab it before he took it down, they asked something about what would happen if plants died in an area. That’s the most open ended question I’ve every seen, but they’ll ask something like that. They’ll probably ask one harder question on cell structure or function where you have to remember information about organelles, but if you just write whatever you remember, if you know the course, you’ll probably hit the points.
I’m going to review all the multiple choice questions, just go through all of them, and make sure I understand the answer and what they’re asking, and then I might write out a full answer to #2, which asks you for a graph and an explanation, just to get practice doing a graph and writing the explanation. Three of the questions were used as test questions throughout the year, so I’ve already answered most of them.</p>
<p>Hey guys I’m trying to cram all the content that I need to know at the last second :P.
Are there any topics though that I can omit and save time?</p>
<p>Cell division, Heredity, Molecular Bio, Evolution, Biological Diversity, Plant, Animal Form and Function, Animal Reproduction and Development, Animal Behavior, Ecology.</p>
<p>^ Is there a category in that that’s barely going to be tested?</p>
<p>^Maybe the animal stuff</p>
<p>@agtaco I went through the entire practice test and there were very few questions, if any, that covered plants and animal behavior. A lot of MC questions on the practice give you the definitions or explain situations and ask you to make predictions and connections rather than remember specific facts. I don’t know if you’ve taken the ACT, but a lot of the practice’s questions were similar to the questions on the science section of the ACT. So at this point cramming won’t help you that much. Just be prepared to have to make sense of dense questions and analyze information that you probably won’t know, especially for the last third or quarter of the test.</p>
<p>Yea at this point cramming facts wont help but some some conceptual ideas will. </p>
<p>For example knowing the basic processes of photosynthesis, cell respiration, and mitosis/meiosis will help. Are there any other major ones?</p>
<p>@agtaco There will most likely be nothing on Animal Reproduction and Development. If you look online you can find released AP Bio exams from the past and that topic is almost never mentioned. I took a practice today and I found no questions on it so I would omit that section. Also, Biological Diversity is pretty much irrelevant in these tests.</p>
<p>@MedicalBoy Yeah, I agree those basic concepts are definitely necessary. They tend to come up often. I would also look at everything regarding DNA (transcription,translation, etc) and RNA. Don’t forget the basics from biochemistry as well!</p>
<p>Is knowing the exact procedure of each AP lab necessary, or will a general overview be fine?</p>
<p>hi everyone!
do any of you guys know where i can get detailed explanations to the multiple choice on the practice exam? I know that the teachers got it w/the course materials (my teacher showed it to us briefly), but I can’t find it anywhere online!</p>
<p>thanks!</p>
<p>@ubermika
Look at the link on page 28 of this thread</p>
<p>Thanks @agtaco 
I hadn’t clicked on it earlier because I read other people mentioning a link wasn’t working.</p>
<p>Guys how do you structure the “essays” just a long paragraph for each part of the long responses? Or just a few sentences for every frq regardless of short or long response? Also since the problems are like act science, is here any pt in studying? I guess for the Frqs?</p>
<p>does anybody know the curve yet? I took the second model test in barron’s and got a 70%, is that a 5? (not counting essay or grid, but i got all the grids right except the first one)</p>
<p>Speaking of that, can anybody with Barron’s tell me how to do those problems? (model test 2 grid question 1 with the water flux or something)</p>
<p>thanx</p>
<p>Does anyone understand question #54 on the new released practice test (it deals with the Ara Operon)? I don’t understand it…
Thanks</p>
<p>Can we come up with a list of all the essential topic that we must for sure know?</p>
<p>Such as evolution, signal transduction, cell communication, respiration, photosynthesis, protein synthesis, DNA, RNA, Mendel’s laws, Etc…</p>
<p>Then we can spend less time of the small stuff.</p>
<p>@apstudent1: depending on the question it could be a long answer or something really short. You are the judge of what information you want to put to answer the question. The more you put that is levant the more points that could be given to you. Just avoid too much unnecessary information or over displaying answers such as when a questions asks for descriptions of two of the three following items. Do not go out of your way to write about all three. They will read about the first two and not give any points for the third.
And yes there is a point in studying (like there is for anything). If you look over the FRQs on the released exam you’d see that they are pretty general topics. So if you study well for them, you’d be able to answer them easily. And the “actual science” will usually need to be supported by facts that you have studied. How would you interpret data without the necessary knowledge to why it happened?</p>
<p>@CaptainSwag: not sure about the curve but I remember my bio teacher telling me something about the scoring not entirely sure if its accurate it goes something like this:</p>
<br>
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<p>@collegemonopoly: the explanation should be in the back. But here’s my explanation:
They are testing if the bacteria will produce the enzymes to digest arabinose in the presence of it so to tell this they used a plasmid for the GFP protein which will make the bacteria become green if it produced the enzyme. B is wrong because you can’t have “increase expression” it’s just expression and it is an overall thing. C is wrong because if those genes are activated then the bacteria should’ve been green. D is wrong because without ampicillin the green showed as well. Therefore A is true. It also is true because only in the presence of arabinose were there green bacteria.</p>
<p>Oh wait I read act science as actual science awkward…
But there is still a point in studying. You will need to still apply some knowledge to some of the questions. It won’t all be easy.</p>
<p>collegemonopoly:</p>
<p>It seems like a straightfoward question about what an operon is. You should have learned that gene expression is highly regulated. In eukaryotes such as us we have things like RNA splicing, addition of a 5’ cap and poly(A) tail. Bacteria don’t have this but they have operons.</p>
<p>Bacteria can produce enzymes that digest various sugars. However it would be wasteful if they produced these enzymes constantly. It’s much better for them to only produce enzymes when they need it. In the ara operon in the problem, it is arranged so that the genes that code for the things that enable arabinose to be degraded are only transcribed when arabinose is present. If you replace those genes with the gene that encodes GFP (something that glows green), then when arabinose is added, the gene that codes for GFP to be made will be transcribed instead of the usual gene that codes for arabinose degrading enzymes. So A is the only real choice and the rest of the answer choices are distrators.</p>