<p>lol sorry I meant “has” 
typed too fast. I meant as in people who have taken the USABO semifinals in previous years had any other info about the exam.</p>
<p>thanks for the info. I was kind of wondering like how many questions, like is it also 50 multiple choice, etc. And do you know how the semis are scored? I heard it was out of 150 ish…</p>
<p>I just took it today. I think it was 120 m/c questions for parts (a and b combined) and then 2 free response questions each worth 20 for a total of 160 points. </p>
<p>My question is what score would you need around to qualify? I’m not sure if this is right but normally the cutoff is around 70%? so 112 points?</p>
<p>I know more about plants than I thought possible…Raven’s Biology of Plants is so dense with information a page of it takes longer to read than 5 of Campbell’s.
On the plus side, reading campbell’s feels like reading a kids book</p>
<p>Would studying from Campbells AP Edition No. 7 and Cliffs be sufficient enough to make semifinals?</p>
<p>^ i read a few chapters of raven, and i felt it was kind of the other way around, idk why lol. theres more info, but i felt that campbell took longer to read</p>
<p>^Really?
I can read a good 350 pages of campbell a day if I’ve got 9 hours or so to spare. With lots of breaks. But Raven’s feels more exhausting to read, like it has so many terms to learn that getting through a paragraph feels like wading through mud. The first 5 chapters of Raven are easy, but then it gets into plant reproduction and life cycles and every paragraph has a couple of new vocab words… I’m gonna finish Campbell’s tomorrow and hopefully read a bit of a molecular bio book before the test next week. I really hope I make finals.</p>
<p>Gardenofpotter, what are your methods to reading? Do you take notes? I take almost 2-2.5 hours to internalize a single chapter…</p>
<p>Please, enlighten us.</p>
<p>Yeah well I take like 5-6 hours per chapter 
hahaha</p>
<p>but its still my first read of campbell’s and there’s quite a bit of stuff that’s new to me…</p>
<p>I take about an hour to read 45-50 pages in Campbell’s. And then I need a break of a few minutes so I don’t get bored. If you’re talking about specific methods…I read through it, then I try and explain to myself in my own words. If I can, I move on. If I can’t, I read through the chapter again and then see if I can explain most of the concepts to myself. Some chapters take longer; photosynthesis, replication, respiration, and cell communication took 4 or 5 readings for me to really get a good understanding of them.
Also, I like plant and animal anatomy, so those chapters are going by pretty fast; hence the 300 pages a day. The first half of campbell’s felt a lot more complicated; I really didn’t like biochemistry…
i don’t take notes when I read either, because I feel like I don’t know an effective mthod for note-taking while reading. Plus, I’m semi-cramming for the Semifinal test, so I’m going as quickly as I can.</p>
<p>Oh just a question…</p>
<p>For people who own Raven’s biology of plants…does the full Raven’s textbook include everything in Raven’s plant bio as well? or is Raven’s Biology of Plants simply a more in-depth exploration of plants and such?</p>
<p>I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing Raven’s General Biology book is the equivalent of campbell. Raven’s bio of plants alone is nearly 700 pages, so I don’t think that information could be in a general bio book along with other info. The general book is 1300+ pages, and that’s around the same length as campbell’s.</p>
<p>Well, I’ve taken the semifinal exam. It was my first time taking it so it was pretty difficult for me. I spent most of my time on parts A and B; maybe spent 20 minutes on part C? I probably didn’t make it to finals.</p>
<p>^ Part A is like the open format right?</p>
<p>im quite nervous for part B/C… first time taking semis too =(</p>
<p>Yes. Part B is also similar to the multiple choice format but involves graphs, diagrams, experiments, and other things while Part A usually just asks more direct questions.</p>
<p>@gardenofpotter That is amazing speed… and as a fellow competitor, it is making me nervous as heck.</p>
<p>What do you guys think of Raven’s General Bio? Maybe its just me, but I think it actually has more information than Campbell</p>
<p>took the exam last week, thought it was harder than last year’s semi (part B was a killer), but nothing obscure. @cynical555 don’t worry too much about gardenofpotter’s amazing reading skills. there really weren’t any questions that relied on knowing raven’s plant biology. </p>
<p>any predictions for what the cutoff score is going to be? i think ~100 should be enough.</p>
<p>I predict that the cutoff score will be somewhere between 100-120. It will probably be above 100 since Section C was pretty easy.</p>
<p>How much is the entire test generally worth?</p>
<p>I didn’t have a chance to add up all of the points wheb I took the test but usually there are between 150-170 points. On the 2009 semifinal exam there were 167 points. 60 for Part A, 67 for Part B and 40 for Part C.</p>