AP Biology

  • Advanced Placement Biology is a college-level course available to juniors and seniors who qualify as per the criteria stated above. The AP Biology course is designed to help students develop their advanced inquiry and reasoning skills, such as designing a plan for collecting data, analyzing, data, applying mathematical routines, and connecting concepts in and across domains by emphasizing science practices.
    The science practices enable a student to establish lines of evidence and use them to develop and refine testable explanations and predictions of natural phenomena. Because content, inquiry and reasoning are equally important in AP Biology, each learning objective combines content with inquiry and reasoning skills described in the science practices.
    The key concepts and related content of AP Biology are organized around four underlying principles called the big ideas, which encompass the core of scientific principles, theories and processes governing living organisms and biological systems. There are required laboratory activities for each big idea. There is a summer assignment to be completed for the first day of class.


    Big Idea 1: Evolution
    The process of evolution drives the diversity and unity of life.
    Big Idea 2: Cellular Processes: Energy and Communication
    Biological systems utilize free energy and molecular building blocks to grow, reproduce, and to maintain dynamic homeostasis.
    Big Idea 3: Genetics and Information Transfer
    Living systems store, retrieve, transmit, and respond to information essential to life processes.
    Big Idea 4: Interactions
    Biological systems interact, and these systems and their interactions possess complex properties.
    * Students have the right to refuse to dissect, vivisect, incubate, capture, or otherwise harm or destroy animals or any parts thereof as part of their course instruction.
    This is offered as a College-In-High-School (CHS) course in affiliation with a local college/university for optional college credit.

    Prerequisite:

    • Successful completion of Biology with a final grade of 90 % or better, or successful completion of Honors Biology with a final grade of 85% or better.
    • An overall G.P.A. of 3.0 or better.
    • Successful completion of Honors Chemistry with an 80% or better, or successful completion of Academic Chemistry with an 85% or better.