Ap biology exam?

Question

i took the ap biology test this year and got a 3. i thought i did better and shouldve gotten a 4. should i rescore the test and see if it boosts me. please help would rescoring increase my chances of getting a 4.

Answer 1

I think I'll try to explain how the rescoring works, so you'd have a little more information to work with.

Rescoring by hand is basically done by a reader who holds your multiple-choice answer sheet and matches the answers on it to a set of correct answers. The only difference between this process and the one which everyone's scores go through is that machine-related errors are eliminated. This implies that only answer sheets that are damaged or filled in the wrong way can possibly benefit from manual rescoring.

Examples include:

- Bent/folded answer sheet

- Terribly smudged answer bubbles

- Answer sheets with dirt on them

- Bubbles filled in with the wrong type of pencil

The last problem is one I've had some experience with. A personal friend of mine is usually near the top of her class for economics, but scored a 1 on BOTH her AP Micro and Macroeconomics exams. When I asked her about it she mentioned that she used a 6B pencil (under the British pencil classification system it is a pencil that is very soft, with extremely high graphite content, smudges easily and is usually used only by artists - and the Collegeboard wants the answers filled with a No. 2, or HB pencil). In her case provided she didn't do anything silly like filling in her answer bubbles all off by one row or something, her pencil probably did her in.

Now this might be a possibility for you, but consider her situation: she WOULD have gotten a five if not for her pencil problem, and given that she used the same pencil throughout, chances are she got exactly ZERO for her MCQ section, and even with her really good FRQ score, she still scored 1. Now with biology the situation might be slightly different, but with a TWO-THIRDS weightage assigned to the MCQ section, any pencil-related errors would definitely end you up with a 1, not a 3. There is a chance that there's something wrong with your answer sheet, but I wouldn't bank on it.

Which leads me to my conclusion: retake the exam. The chance that rescoring would improve your score is extremely low, and chances are that you just underperformed on the exam due to stress or other factors. The Collegeboard is not an organization that would bump scores up for people who pay up the fee (though there is a statistical chance that there might have been a slight problem in the machine reading), since they have a reputation to defend. So I would strongly recommend that you retake the test (if you want to be very sure you'll get your credit - good schools don't take anything less than 5s - MIT is one of them) if you're really bent on getting a better score.

Just a quick study tip: buy this book called 'Biology: Eighth Edition' by Campbell and Reece. I self-studied for the AP Biology exam in 2007 by reading this book (though it was 7th ed then) cover to cover once, and its summaries twice or so. I got 5, and I am pretty sure if you study the book thoroughly a 5 is definitely within your grasp.

Good luck.

Answer 2

The chances that they scored it wrong are slim, but you could give it a shot.

Answer 3

The Collegeboard doesn't usually make these kinds of mistakes. You should be happy with a 3. In reality, you typically get the same amount of credit for a 3 and a 4 in college.