Ocr Biology A level

I recommend the CGP Student Book (Your school may offer it cheaper at the start of the year). It's a great midpoint between a textbook and revision guide which is great for reviewing your knowledge. It's also not very.... CGP-y? No bad jokes or puns that make you want to groan and possibly set fire to the book.

Other than that, it's just a case of staying on top of your work, doing your homework thoroughly and making sure your exam technique is good. Good luck!

Many thanks
What are the best exam techniques according to you

I agree with the above poster.

Also, buy the OCR heinnman textbook for the course, it really is the best textbook in my opinion.
In my sixth form, our teacher made us make 'pre-reading notes'. Basically, before your lesson, make notes on the topics that will be covered in the lesson, use the specification to help you. During the lesson, add to your pre-reading notes (any useful points or elaborations that you teacher has talked about in lesson). You can then re-write your notes towards the end of the year, or you can just use the notes for revision for the exam. I did the latter because I was lazy. Lol.

Also, people always seem to forget about ISAs. I made that mistake and ended up getting a C, or D for my F213 (I can't remember). I suggest buying the guide by Philip Allen, and preparing from the beginning. It's a good idea to develop an understanding on the things that you learn in the course, because that will definitely help for the ISAs, especially evaluative.


Best of luck next year and on results day!!



Posted from TSR Mobile

I recommend the CGP Student Book (Your school may offer it cheaper at the start of the year). It's a great midpoint between a textbook and revision guide which is great for reviewing your knowledge. It's also not very.... CGP-y? No bad jokes or puns that make you want to groan and possibly set fire to the book.

Other than that, it's just a case of staying on top of your work, doing your homework thoroughly and making sure your exam technique is good. Good luck!

But I like the CGP jokes.

How hard would you say Biology is at A-Level? Do you think it's a very tough subject or passable with a reasonable amount of effort and revision.

Would you need to spend weeks revision, or only like 1-3 weeks?

Eh, you're lucky then. GCSE sciences with all those CGP revision guides for me was essentially the deepest circle of hell.

It's difficult to say, because I messed about for my first term, so I dropped behind and had to do so much work in order to catch up. However, I caught up within a half term break when I actually put my mind to it, so provided you put your mind to it and keep on top of all the work you should be fine!

As for revision, I started to do half-revision (so, making additional notes on top of my lessons) about two months before the exams, and then actual revision started a month early. But, I didn't need to revise for one exam (because it was media studies) and I couldn't go full-blown revision on Physics because we were learning content until very close to the exam. Constant revision will make your life easier at exam time, but it's perfectly possible to power through about six weeks before your exams.

I personally loved using them during GCSE Science revision. I know a lot of people hate them though.

So about six weeks revision along with a bit of small revision during the course? I'm guessing that's about average across all A-Level subjects then or would you say it's a bit more than your usual A-Level? By 'usual A-Level' I exclude the easier subjects like Media where one may revise less or not at all of course.

Honestly it all depends on how well you're coping. My biology exam technique was.... not great, whereas my maths was pretty good, so I did more for biology than I did for maths. However, to balance it out, I found the maths content harder. Most A-levels with majority weighted in exam (i.e. not a creative subject) will ask for the same level of commitment, and you just have to adjust the scales, so to speak, depending on how good you are at the subject.