CfE Advanced Higher Biology 2015/2016

Have any of you started your experiments yet? If so, how are they going and what are you doing? Anyone doing Botrytis?
I actually love how everyone is saying how much better Chemistry is this year to Biology. I thought it was just me. I can't wait to get the BrightRed book and finally be able to use it for the single month that it'll be out before the exam.

I only took this course for medicine and I really really want to drop it now, anyone else find it impossible to study because there is no questions out there? I can manage the unit on cells and proteins ok but the other unit about evolution and sex and stuff is just so boring and I have no idea what is going on in it at all.

Any suggestions?

I only took this course for medicine and I really really want to drop it now, anyone else find it impossible to study because there is no questions out there? I can manage the unit on cells and proteins ok but the other unit about evolution and sex and stuff is just so boring and I have no idea what is going on in it at all.

Any suggestions?

The bright red book comes out in April?? What a joke

It comes out in March. There's no specific date though so I'm assuming it will be mid-to-late March. Then we'll only have about 1 and a half months to use it. To be honest, they've pushed the release date back so much already that they'll probably end up releasing it after we actually sit the exam. It's all so unorganised. They really shouldn't start a new course until they've actually got adequate resources and have properly planned the courses out. In some subjects they are still making changes to course content and data booklets. It's absolutely ridiculous.

Agreed. The course itself is really interesting, but there is no enough resources available for both students and teachers. My biology teacher often teach us stuffs way beyond our level. Now I'm not complaining or blaming him, as he doesn't know how much we need to know. It's great to know other stuffs, but we usually just sit sheepishly while our teacher explains enthusiastically the difference between necrosis and apoptosis... The past papers are very out-of-date too so I don't even know what the questions are gonna be like.

Are there learning outcomes on the SQA site?

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yep, my teacher printed out a copy for each of us. But some topics, necrosis for example, my teacher said you can't fully understand apoptosis without learning about necrosis, but necrosis is not in the learning outcomes.
So yeah....

Surely you can't be doing apoptosis in that much detail though?


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idk... I don't think we are meant to learn apoptosis in great detail but i guess the background knowledge can really help sometimes... I can understand why my teacher would teach us the background knowledge. For AH biology, I feel that it's impossible to memorize without understanding the contents, even if I managed to cram all the information into my short term memory, I will forget them the next day. So it's crucial to understand the stuffs before copy the notes down and copy out again and again and again.
But these background knowledge can be quite complex and time-consuming to explain, so the lessons are often delayed. We end up having less time to learn about what is actually in the learning intentions.
The SCHOLAR notes are very helpful, but I just wish there are more textbooks/past papers out there. I'd love to learn more but I wanna pass AH biology too!

Surely you can't be doing apoptosis in that much detail though?


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You best get used to memorising a **** tonne of stuff now, it doesn't get any easier in med school ahaha.

By this time next year you'll be looking at AH bio and wondering why you thought it was alot of work

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hahahha now you look back and definitely would find AHs much easier~
as a medic, how much memorising do you do? a medium textbook a week?

Nah, like a few thousand words every week. If you're super interested I'll pm you some PBL notes so you can see how much we do every week

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Anyone here know any site/s that gives examples on previous AH biology writeups? I need to see examples before I could actually write up my investigation :/

I don't know any off the top of my head, but ask your school - they usually keep copies of old investigations. Failing that pester people you know who've done AH biology in the past to email you a copy.