Standard Set #2: AP Biology Unit 1

Continuing with my posts of my standards I hope to implement next year in my AP Biology class.

This set of standards apply to the first unit of my AP Biology course. The first unit covers review material that students should have been exposed to in previous classes, such as basic characteristics of living things and chemistry. I did not include any chemistry standards because I feel that this is such a small piece of the overall course that they did not need to be given their own entries. Also, much of the chemistry knowledge that AP Biology requires can be assessed at other points in the course when students are required to apply that knowledge (photosynthesis/respiration reactions, enzyme activity, etc) or are picked up by other standards within this unit (water properties, hydrolysis/dehydration, etc).

This is the first set of standards that I wrote completely myself. The writing was fairly quick, which surprised me. It was also interesting to see what had been previously seven chapters in a textbook reduced to 10 entries in a spreadsheet. But this forced me to sit down and really think about what I expected the students to know or be able to do by the end of the unit. That may be one of the "hidden" bonuses of standard based grading, that it forces teachers to really think about what they need from students, and not focus on the minutia.

Please feel free to use these standards as is, download them and edit them, whatever. Again, the formatting is to make them easy to upload into BlueHarvest.