Advanced placement biology programs vary greatly from school to school and from year to year, depending greatly on who teaches the course and the emphasis given.
Many courses teach to the exam.
In such courses, the students spend much of their time memorizing the text book material. Other courses may be much more process oriented. These provide the students not only with a good grounding in the basic vocabulary of biology, but also a good idea of the process of science. Because of this wide variation in AP courses, the current policy on AP credit is as follows. Note that here the credits are natural science and not biological science.