Edexcel A2 Biology Unit 5 (6BIO5) - 22/06/2011- OFFICIAL THREAD !

im chilled out. I got A in A2 PE for the record.
Got the mark scheme?

OH MY GOD AN A IN A2 PE. WHOA.



Anyway, we'll know who is right on the 21st (not that it matters much).

yeah good one. stop quoting me unless youve got the ms and paper otherwise i dont care what you say tbh. now get baking doughboy....

Was that supposed to make me feel bad?

Make yourself useful and go polish your big, fat, impressive A in Physical Education

dont....actually....care...and i'll polish it along with my A grades in Chem and bio that ive acheived

nice one mr kipling

Make yourself useful and go polish your big, fat, impressive A in Physical Education

im chilled out. I got A in A2 PE for the record.
Got the mark scheme?

Do people actually still rememeber what was on this paper? Let go and enjoy your summer people!

And who says we can't enjoy summer and remember what was on the paper?

You idea of enjoyment is probably very different to mine then. Tbh once the exam is done it's done. No need to faff about looking for markschemes and stuff it's not going to change your grade.

Did you seriously need to tell a group of 18 year olds that?

Your idea of enjoyment is probably one-sided. You sound like the type who thinks that you can't have a great social life and good grades. Looking at markschemes and question papers will obviously not change our grades and it should obviously not interfere with any of our 'summer fun'.

Ok so I seem to identify 3 main problems with this paper, 2 minor ones and one major one. They are as follows.

1) One minor problem was the fact that not a lot of the material was actually tested. Of course, not everything can be tested but in AS Units as well as Unit 4 they did manage to test a lot of the material. This time however, and this is how I see it, they sacrificed testing a lot of the material for that Scientific Article, which in my opinion somewhat ruined the paper.

I think that they were doing pretty nicely in the first six questions in terms of the amount of material tested.

2) Another minor problem was the fact that there seemed to be an excess of A* level questions. We are used to plenty of "Suggest" questions, however I must admit that weaker candidates, or candidates aiming for lower grades, would have found it difficult to answer many of the questions, as there were only very few easy marks to get. Nonetheless this problem was a minor one, as one should have tackled the paper with the whole How Science Works/Critical Thinking Approach idea.

Questions 1, 2, 5 and 6 were almost totally recall questions. Almost the whole of question 3 asked us to 'suggest'. Question 5 didn't have much for us to 'suggest' but it was a very difficult question due to the 'explaining ectopic beats' part. We had a fair amount of recall in the first six questions so I'd have to disagree with your comment underlined comment.

Question 7 is the epitome of what you described above though. Lots of 'A* questions' and I actually cannot identify a sub-question in Q7 that is straight forward

3) So here comes the major problem. Time. Honestly I do not know what the examiners were on about. I doubt they even considered the fact that the time allocated to the paper was not enough. The questions, most of them needing thinking, needed time to be answered. Even if someone tried to answer all theory questions in 50 minutes (quite hard), answering the article questions in the remaining 40 minutes would be pretty hard, considering how time was wasted due to wrong references or ridiculous questions such as "Give three specific examples from the article". I mean, we've discussed the whole time problem before. And it's pretty much evident of a problem. They've given the AS exams extra 15 minutes each, and I wouldn't be surprised if they do the very same thing next year for this Unit. At least we were the first to sit the paper, so hopefully there will be some upgrading.

If I had 15 more minutes I would have aced that paper. I think I screwed up whatever I screwed up because I panicked when I realised how little time I had left.

I personally think I did quite well, expecting something around 65-70/90 at the very worst case, with most of the points being lost at the article. So hopefully there will be some upgrading so I can score over 90% to get that A* I need for Cambridge. Luckily I think I did really well on Units 4 and 6. However only time will show.

67/90 was needed for 120/120 in 6BI04 January (and that was a fairly easy and straight-forward paper). I'll risk it and say that 65 will surely be full UMS. Good for you!

Comments are welcome.

Both muscles are contracted when holding the weight in place.