Trythis free biology practice test to see how prepared you are for a biology exam. Whether you are in high school or college, you are likely to have a biology requirement. Biology tests cover such subjects as the chemistry of life, evolution, genetics and ecology.
For a more comprehensive study of biology, try our 400 question Biology Practice Exam.
The AP Biology course is focused on enduring, conceptual understandings and content that supports these understandings. The emphasis of the course is on learning essential concepts and reasoning skills. It is the equivalent of a two-semester college introductory course. Our free AP Biology practice test is a great place to start your exam prep.
The AP Biology test is divided into two sections. Section I is multiple choice and Section II is free response. You have 90 minutes to complete each section, and each section will account for half of your grade.
AP Biology is an introductory college-level biology course. Students cultivate their understanding of biology through inquiry-based investigations as they explore topics like evolution, energetics, information storage and transfer, and system interactions.
Based on the Understanding by Design (Wiggins and McTighe) model, this course framework provides a clear and detailed description of the course requirements necessary for student success. The framework specifies what students must know, be able to do, and understand, with a focus on the big ideas that encompass core principles, theories, and processes of the discipline. The framework also encourages instruction that prepares students for advanced work in STEM majors.
The AP Biology framework is organized into eight commonly taught units of study that provide one possible sequence for the course. As always, you have the flexibility to organize the course content as you like.
Higher education professionals play a key role in developing AP courses and exams, setting credit and placement policies, and scoring student work. The AP Higher Education section features information on recruitment and admission, advising and placement, and more.
This chart shows recommended scores for granting credit, and how much credit should be awarded, for each AP course. Your students can look up credit and placement policies for colleges and universities on the AP Credit Policy Search.
The AP Program is unique in its reliance on Development Committees. These committees, made up of an equal number of college faculty and experienced secondary AP teachers from across the country, are essential to the preparation of AP course curricula and exams.
The Pre-AP science areas of focus are vertically aligned to the science practices embedded in high school and college courses, including AP. This gives students multiple opportunities to think and work like scientists as they develop and strengthen these disciplinary reasoning skills throughout their education in the sciences:
These resources support teachers as they design instruction for each unit, but do not constitute a full day-by-day curriculum. They are intended to be used alongside local school or district materials to address objectives of the course framework:
Pre-AP Biology does require additional resources for model lessons. Most are commonly found in science stock rooms and are low-tech and low-cost, ensuring that all students can engage in inquiry-based investigations and reasoning. These include:
A final exam allows students to demonstrate their success on the skills and content outlined in the course frameworks. This exam is optional. Pre-AP has not offered practice exams or published exam questions from prior years.
Finally, note that even earning a 1 or 2 on the exam can bode well, with the College Board reporting that students who scored below a 3 still perform significantly better in introductory college classes.
The AP Biology course is an introductory college-level course. Recommended perquisites include high school courses in biology and chemistry. The College Board provides detailed guidelines for the AP Biology Course, which is designed to cover the following skills:
While most students are familiar with a multiple-choice exam structure, the AP Bio FRQ can be a bit more daunting for many students. Fortunately, the College Board allows you to access free response questions from past exams, along with scoring guidelines and sample responses from exam takers.
Sand lances of the genus Ammodytes are small fish that function as keystone organisms in several coastal ecosystems. These sand lances are prey fish that support organisms at higher trophic levels. Scientists performed experiments to examine how sand lance populations are likely to be affected by the rising temperatures and CO 2 levels associated with climate change.
Sand lance embryos typically develop and mature into adult fish at low temperatures (approximately 5C) and stable, low CO 2 levels (approximately 400 μatm). Over the course of two years, the scientists measured the survival rate of sand lance embryos allowed to develop and mature in a laboratory at three different temperatures, 5C, 7C, and 10C, with the level of CO 2 maintained at 400 μatm, 1,000 μatm, and 2,100 μatm for each temperature.
The College Board provides a number of strategies for answering the free response questions, including monitoring your time appropriately and reading through all questions first to determine which ones you feel most prepared to answer.
Our interactive AP Bio Score Calculator can help you experiment with different scenarios and prepare you for possible score outcomes. It is useful to go into the exam knowing how many points you need in each section for your target score.
While a 5 is the best AP score, it is important to establish your individualized target score before the exam. Depending on various factors, including your college and major aspirations, your AP course load, and your anticipated AP exam schedule, you may determine that your target score is actually a 3 or a 4.
AP Biology is one of the most popular courses within the gamut of AP courses. It covers fundamental concepts in Biology at the foundational level and teaches students critical thinking through core science practices. While the course may be vast and challenging, you will be able to build a strong foundation in Biology, which can set you up for success at the college level.
The course content is broken down into units, which are further broken down into smaller topics to make learning easy. Each of these units is based on the 4 Big Ideas, known as the essential biological concepts critical to a strong foundation in biology. The exam itself is made up of 60 multiple choice questions (MCQs) and 6 free-response questions (FRQs) from these units with varying weightages. You can read more about the exam format from our AP Biology Exam Format.
Science Practices are skills vital to the study and practice of biology. They promote critical thinking and analysis, which are necessary for further studies in biology and are also key to doing well on the exam. You will be expected to develop and master these skills throughout the AP Biology course. In addition, each unit within the course will encourage learning a particular set of science practices.
In continuation with the study of cells from Unit 2, in Unit 3 you will learn about cellular energetics. Living systems are composed of cells in a complex manner and require a steady inflow of energy. This unit will teach you how this energy is captured, stored, and used. The main processes you will study include photosynthesis and cellular respiration.
Transduction pathways enable cells to communicate. Cells can also receive and generate signals in response to environmental cues. As part of the cell cycle, cells can also coordinate growth mechanisms, replicating and regulating replications to enable continuity of life. In this unit, you will explore how cells use energy and information transmission to communicate and replicate.
Natural selection is a mechanism in evolution that enables populations to be better adapted to their environment, allowing them to survive and reproduce. In this unit, you will study mechanisms of evolutionary change and supporting evidence. One of the main highlights of this unit is exploring the Hardy-Weinberg principle of equilibrium and using it to make predictions about a population. You will also learn to calculate and evaluate the evolution of a population, or the lack thereof, from allele frequencies.
Through ongoing partnership with teachers across New York City, New Visions has developed this course map for a high school biology course fully designed to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the New York State Science Learning Standards (NYSSLS). Each unit follows a common structure: students engage with an anchor phenomenon and develop questions; go through sequences of learning and sense-making to develop and iterate on answers to those questions; then complete a three-dimensional performance task.
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The AP teacher prior to me basically taught a 90% lecture-based class and did all lecture orally and by creating drawings on the board while speaking, so I had nothing I could use from him. The College Board provided a ton of resources for test questions, but I had to read the exams over and over and organize the questions so I could have unit exams with only content related to a specific unit.
Finally, the textbook came with resources for teachers, but I have just NEVER been a fan of any textbook resources (hence why I started my TpT store) so I had to come up with entirely fresh content, and content that was college-level in depth.
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