I am currently a junior, and I am beginning the process of selecting my courses for next year. Along with AP Spanish Language and Culture and AP Art History, I would like to take AP Biology, but am feeling a bit conflicted.
After an overall rough freshman year of high school, I didn’t receive the grades I wanted to in freshman biology. Since then, I’ve aced chem and physics, and I am confident I can find success in AP. While I do not plan on pursuing a math/science career in college, I would like to redeem myself after my freshman year biology grades by proving I am capable of handling the coursework. I would also like to show colleges that I am versatile in my ability to handle an eclectic variety of subjects, while demonstrating that I have changed since having a rough freshman year.
I was wondering if this is a good idea. If anyone who has taken the AP Biology course can give me some insight as to its difficulty, your help would be greatly appreciated.
Not sure about the difficulty of AP Bio, but maybe you should go over some study guides (Barrons, Princeton Review, Kaplan etc) and use online resources such as Khan Academy. Review the information yourself and see how you handle it. I think you should definitely challenge yourself but your decision is a personal choice.
I think the difficulty of the course depends heavily on the school. At my school, AP Bio is the hardest course we offer. There are plenty of other posters on here who say it’s significantly easier than chem and physics. I would say that a lot of the difficulty comes from the sheer amount of material that it covers and how hard it is to get a 5 on the AP exam (although this wouldn’t be that important if you take it as a senior). If you’re up for a lot of reading, I think you’ll be fine, especially because your other APs don’t have tons of reading, imo.
AP Bio is a tough class. At my daughter’s school it seems significantly tougher than AP Calc and AP Psych and AP Econ. I think it depends on the type of college you want to apply to. Top colleges would want 4 years of science.