Advanced Placement Biology

In the United States, Advanced Placement Biology (also known as AP Biology and AP Bio), is a course and examination offered by the College Board to high school students as an opportunity to earn placement credit for a college-level biology course.

The Course

This course is offered to highly motivated students who wish to pursue their interests in the life sciences. The College Board recommends a successful completion of high school biology and high school chemistry, before commencing AP Biology, although the actual prerequisites vary from school to school and from state to state. Many schools, for example, require no background in biology to take the course. There are critics of the AP program that believe that the high school science curriculum does not adequately prepare students with a background college-level scientific studies and that students who have studied AP Biology do not perform as well in college science classes as might be expected of someone who successfully completed an AP course in the subject matter.

Topics covered
Topics covered by this course include:

Anatomy & Physiology
Biochemistry
Biodiversity
Botany
The Cell
Developmental biology
Ecology
Genetics
Molecular Biology
Origin of life
Population Biology
Evolution
Molecular Genetics

These topics that are covered may change due to a new course curriculum that will take place in 2013. The new course description is now on College Board. It will include less of the topics information to be known about some of the topics above and will focus on more important topics and lab procedures.

The exam
The AP test for this course consists of two sections. Section I, administered over a period of 1 hour 20 minutes (80 minutes), consists of 100 multiple-choice questions. Section II, which lasts 1 hour and 30 minutes, consists of 4 essay prompts to be answered comprehensively by the student. A mandated 10 minute reading period is held prior to beginning to write the four essays. The 10 minutes provided for the reading period are NOT included in the total 1 hour and 30 minutes allowed for writing the essays; during this time, a student may record notes in the exam booklet containing the essay prompt, though the booklet used to record official essay responses must remain sealed until the reading period is completed. Overall, the exam thus lasts 180 minutes, or three hours.

The exam grade is weighted unevenly between Section I and Section II, with 60% of the score dependent on success in Section I and the remaining 40% determined by results from Section II.

Most colleges award credit in an introductory biology course for a score of 3 or higher. Higher tier schools generally only accept a score of 4 or 5.

Grade distribution
In the 2007 administration, 144,796 students took the exam from 8,486 schools. In the 2008 administration, the exam grades were recalibrated, resulting in a substantial decrease in the top scores and increase in the bottom scores. In the 2009 and 2010 administrations, 159,580 and 172,512 students took the test, respectively.

The grade distributions for 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 were: