Section I multiple choice

Section I Blueprint and Score Targets

Section I of the AP Biology exam consists of 60 four-option multiple-choice questions (A–D) administered digitally in Bluebook. You have 90 minutes to complete the section, which accounts for 50% of your total exam score. There are no grid-in or multi-select items; every question, including calculations, has four choices and one best answer. There is no guessing penalty.

Where the Questions Come From

Keep the Course and Exam Description (CED) weightings in mind so you know what biological principles are being tested underneath unfamiliar experimental scenarios:

• Heavyweight Units (37–52% combined): Unit 7 Natural Selection ($13\text{--}20\%$), Unit 3 Cellular Energetics ($12\text{--}16\%$), and Unit 6 Gene Expression and Regulation ($12\text{--}16\%$). When a prompt introduces an obscure protein or species, it usually maps back to a core idea such as enzyme function, gene regulation, cell signaling, or evolutionary fitness.
• Core Concept & Argumentation Practices: Science Practice 1 (Concept Explanation, $25\text{--}33\%$), Practice 6 (Argumentation, ), and Practice 2 (Visual Representations, ) dominate the section.

Question Types and Fastest Reliable Methods

1. Stimulus-Based Sets (Typically 4–5 Questions)

Many Section I questions come in sets that share one stimulus, such as a multi-paragraph experimental summary, a signaling pathway model, or a data table or graph (how many varies from exam to exam).

The Reverse-Read Protocol (saves reading time on each set):

1. Skip the stimulus prose initially. Scan only the figure captions, axis labels, and table headers (5–10 seconds).
2. Read the first question stem. Some questions in a set are near-discrete concept questions (e.g., “Which of the following best describes how the steroid hormone enters the target cell?”) that need no reading of the experiment.
3. Mine the stimulus on demand. When a question asks about “Experiment 2” or “Figure 1,” read only the sentence or graph that controls that step.