How to answer the short FRQs on the AP® Biology Exam: Short Free Response Question Tips!

hello everyone today we're going to be going over how to do your best on the short frqs which is part of the free response section of the ap biology exam the nice thing is that in recent years the college board has told us exactly where the points are coming from on each the frqs and the free response questions 3 through six are all going to be some of the shorter ones i also have resources on the long frqs and general frq tips for the ap biology exam so whatever type of free response help you need i have it on this channel so be sure to check those resources out i'll link them in the description below or you can subscribe to this channel to make sure you don't miss out on any of my review tools so remember the free response section of the ap biology exam is actually the second half of the exam that you'll take after you take the multiple choice questions in the free response part which is section two there are longer questions and short questions technically you'll have a 10-minute reading period before you get started in the 80-minute answer period but you can begin answering your questions at any time during the free response section again there's two question types the first two are technically long free response questions which i have another video about and these are worth more points then there are four short or shorter free response questions each of these are usually worth four points now if you're allocating your time for the ap exam you probably want to devote about 20 minutes to each of the long frqs and somewhere around 15 minutes to each of the shorter frqs you do not have to stick to this time schedule but it could be helpful in budgeting yourself as you're going through and taking the ap exam of course i always say the best ways to prepare for any free response question is to do practice questions so you can google ap biology for your response in 2013 to find old questions you can also look at old scoring guidelines which are basically the answer keys but remember the exam changed significantly after 2012 so you don't want to find really old ap biology frqs the other thing too is that before 2019 the format for these questions was not exactly the same they're still long questions and shorter questions but the way that the points were distributed was a little bit different and they're not going to follow the exact structure that's now on the exam so it's fine to practice with questions from 2013 to 2019 however they may be slightly different from the format that i'm going to show you now some general tips for the frqs is to always write incomplete sentences you should not have bullet point lists outlines or drawings unless it tells you to draw something on a specific template but we'll get to that later you can label your responses with a b c etc so you don't have to write it all out in one large paragraph you don't need to obsess over perfect spelling or grammar remember points are not counted off for errors or poor sentence structure but you don't need to write introductory or closing paragraphs no thesis statements and you're not going to get any special bonus points for good writing or topic sentences for example remember not to ramble you can avoid restating the question and remember that the short frqs are usually four points each you want to try to answer all of them but they're worth about only half as much as the longer frqs to prepare for the short frqs you should review experimental design biological concepts and processes models and data interpretation you may need to do a few calculations but it's more likely that those kinds of problems will come up in questions one and two instead the data you'll be interacting with will be data that you'll have to interpret as part of one of the questions but if you are dealing with any sort of math don't forget to show any work your setup and show your units all right so remember questions one and two are the long fear response questions and the short ones start with question three question three is all about a scientific investigation or a lab so you're going to see a real biological experiment and in part a you're going to be asked to describe a concept or process related to that experiment part b you're going to be asked to talk about certain experimental procedures so make sure you review experimental design in part c you're going to be asked to make a prediction or generate a hypothesis based on something that happened in this experiment and then in part d you're going to be asked to justify those predictions that you made you'll get separate points for each one of these sections so you could get for example one out of the four points you cannot get half points though so you can't get for example 2.5 points on this question question four is usually about a biology phenomenon and a disruption to that phenomenon or process so in the first part you're going to be asked to describe a certain part of the process and then in part b explain that process in part c there'll be some change that'll be talked about and you'll have to make another prediction and then of course you'll be asked in part d to justify that prediction in question five you're going to be given a model or a visual representation some type of chart or diagram no you won't need to know any circulatory system details or human anatomy on the ap exam but i put this heart picture in here just for fun so in part a you're going to be asked to describe parts of the model correctly and this could be a visual or a picture of something usually a drawing or some sort of chart you might have come across in part b you're going to have to explain relationships between parts of the model and in part c there might be a template or space on the model provided for you to draw or to add something to that model so this is the only drawing that you might have to do on the ap exam besides generating a graph which would be part of questions one or two on the free responses in part d you're going to have to explain how this model relates to a biological process or a phenomenon but remember this is all relating back to some sort of picture or image that you are seeing in this question in question six you are going to be asked to analyze data this could be in a graph or in a data table part a is going to be some sort of data or math question usually you'll have to interpret some results or describe a trend seen in the data or find a group that represents the highest value of something but make sure you're comfortable with reading charts reading graphs and looking at data in biological experiments in part c you're going to be asked to use your data with a particular hypothesis and then part d you're going to have to relate it back to some biological concept or process or phenomenon you might have noticed that a lot of these were asking you to justify a claim if you've ever had to do a claim evidence and reasoning activity in your science classes this is where that could come in handy so the claim or the prediction is usually provided or you're asked to generate that in a separate part for the justification part on the exam though you're going to want to make sure you relate it back to the data or an observation from the experiment and then your reasoning is going to explain why you stated that thing or why the prediction was made or why the scientist made some sort of particular claim you probably want to use a word like because or since or so that in your explanation but this does not need to be lengthy paragraphs it could really just be a sentence or two describing why the claim was made make sure you cite it back to the evidence and make sure you have that reasoning part that usually follows the word because hopefully you'll have the time to practice some of these use the resources that the college board provides on their website for questions that are closely aligned to those that are going to be on the ap exam use any resources your teachers have provided and the more practice you do the better you'll get and answering these short free response questions questions three through six on the ap bio exam remember i have another video on the long free response questions and general frq tips so be sure to check those out if you need those thanks so much for watching give this video a like if it's been helpful and i'll see you later

Channel: Lasseter’s Lab

Views: 5,309

Keywords: ap biology frq tips, ap bio frqs, short frq tips, what's on the ap biology frqs, ap bio, ap biology

Id: EQOtSx01vA8

Length: 7min 19sec (439 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 30 2021