The November 2025 SAT marked the debut of INCIPIENT as the answer to a vocabulary in context question. The appearance of INCIPIENT caught me and my students by surprise. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have.
INCIPIENT is another example of an AP Bio term that is appearing in difficult vocabulary in context questions. Charles Darwin coined the term “incipient species” to describe a population within a larger species that is in the process of diverging into a distinct new animal or plant. So, an “incipient species” is in the beginning or initial stage of its evolution.
INCIPIENT – in an initial stage, beginning to happen or develop