Biology A level HELPP

Original post by Manos00

We've got pretty much 4 months until the end of year 12 and biology is not a very strong subject for me right now. I take chemistry, spanish and an EPQ as well and my predicted grades are B for both chemistry and spanish, but for biology it goes down to a D :frown:

. Is there anything you guys could suggest that would grow my grade significantly? The way i study doesnt seem to be working and it is kinda frustrating at this point. Thanks!

Being real, biology gets much more difficult in y13. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see massive progress right away. When I first started I was on E, as were many in my class, then slowly progressed to Ds. Even in y13 class assessments, I was still averaging Cs (but when I did past papers at home with my tutor, I would get As/Bs - we did have very harsh marking from teachers which can be discouraging but also helpful because you perfect your technique and actually find you do well in the actual exams). In the final exam, I got a B!
I had to get a tutor which massively helped but what we did was all of the past papers, starting from like 2014 to current day - really helped! Also making notes - I found that it took too long and didn’t really help me so I saved time making notes by using already made online notes, as it’s all about putting it into practice through past papers and questions e.g on physics maths tutor. Kipnotes are the notes I used and they are very good, also Miss Estruch packs like the active recall.
If you have the time to, especially in summer, regularly go over content - maybe with flashcards or a few questions here and there so you don’t forget the content and have to keep re-learning it (I had to learn a lot before my exam because I just never got it in y12/y13 e.g like respiration and photosynthesis (which I actually never fully got even when I did my exam haha) but just do active recall maybe every week on certain topics to test yourself. You will improve from y12 to y13 though so don’t worry - even though it gets harder, you get more to grips with the mark schemes and content and naturally improve!! Best of luck :smile:

any other questions, just reply me

Also how do you currently study for biology?

(edited 1 year ago)

Reply 2

OP

Original post by evefad

Being real, biology gets much more difficult in y13. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see massive progress right away. When I first started I was on E, as were many in my class, then slowly progressed to Ds. Even in y13 class assessments, I was still averaging Cs (but when I did past papers at home with my tutor, I would get As/Bs - we did have very harsh marking from teachers which can be discouraging but also helpful because you perfect your technique and actually find you do well in the actual exams). In the final exam, I got a B!
I had to get a tutor which massively helped but what we did was all of the past papers, starting from like 2014 to current day - really helped! Also making notes - I found that it took too long and didn’t really help me so I saved time making notes by using already made online notes, as it’s all about putting it into practice through past papers and questions e.g on physics maths tutor. Kipnotes are the notes I used and they are very good, also Miss Estruch packs like the active recall.
If you have the time to, especially in summer, regularly go over content - maybe with flashcards or a few questions here and there so you don’t forget the content and have to keep re-learning it (I had to learn a lot before my exam because I just never got it in y12/y13 e.g like respiration and photosynthesis (which I actually never fully got even when I did my exam haha) but just do active recall maybe every week on certain topics to test yourself. You will improve from y12 to y13 though so don’t worry - even though it gets harder, you get more to grips with the mark schemes and content and naturally improve!! Best of luck :smile:

any other questions, just reply me

Also how do you currently study for biology?

Thank you very much for the help! I appreciate it. For biology we have two teachers (each teacher teaches us half of the course). With the stuff i learn with teacher A, i improved my grades from D's to C-B's. With teacher B the highest grade i've got is C but mostly i get D. Sometimes i feel like it can be the way the teacher teaches stuff to us but for now i will stick to my opinion that i just kinda suck at the lesson. As for my revision techniques i would basically check the specification for the topic i revise for and i would make notes which i would get from the textbook we are given. After that i would go for doing past papers. I think that one problem with this technique is that after two weeks i will start forgetting everything i revised. I'm not sure if flash cards are going to be great for biology since it has TONS of things but yeah.

Reply 3

evefad

Original post by Manos00

Thank you very much for the help! I appreciate it. For biology we have two teachers (each teacher teaches us half of the course). With the stuff i learn with teacher A, i improved my grades from D's to C-B's. With teacher B the highest grade i've got is C but mostly i get D. Sometimes i feel like it can be the way the teacher teaches stuff to us but for now i will stick to my opinion that i just kinda suck at the lesson. As for my revision techniques i would basically check the specification for the topic i revise for and i would make notes which i would get from the textbook we are given. After that i would go for doing past papers. I think that one problem with this technique is that after two weeks i will start forgetting everything i revised. I'm not sure if flash cards are going to be great for biology since it has TONS of things but yeah.

Yeah flashcards didn’t work for me for biology but regularly doing past papers helped me to not forget the content as often. Ah same as me, we had two teachers as well teaching different content. I’d say as well for your notes, try to also use past papers to make your notes (as sometimes the textbook notes and answers do not match the specific markscheme so if you use the markscheme answers for certain repetitive questions or topics, you will have the specific answer they are looking for learnt and know you will get the mark.) There’s so much content that it’s likely you will forget some content so don’t worry too much - but when you know you have an exam coming up or it’s getting near, make a plan or timetable to get through everything and do mini questions for them - that’s sometimes when topic specific questions from pmt instead of past papers come in handy.

Also focus on actually understand the content as opposed to just learning and memorising all the time as you are more likely to forget the content eventually if you are just memorising - if you actually fully understand it, you won’t have to memorise it, if that makes sense? Because you will get how it works, why it is like that and so be able to figure out the answer and remember the content.

(edited 1 year ago)

Reply 4

StudyMind

Original post by Manos00

We've got pretty much 4 months until the end of year 12 and biology is not a very strong subject for me right now. I take chemistry, spanish and an EPQ as well and my predicted grades are B for both chemistry and spanish, but for biology it goes down to a D :frown:

. Is there anything you guys could suggest that would grow my grade significantly? The way i study doesnt seem to be working and it is kinda frustrating at this point. Thanks!

Heya!
How do you currently revise for biology? Do you use effective revision methods such as flashcards, blurting etc? Do you do practice questions? If it helps, Study mind has tons of free bio resources from revision notes to practice questions by topic.

I hope this helps!
Milena
UCL PFE
Study Mind

Reply 5

OP

Original post by StudyMind

Heya!
How do you currently revise for biology? Do you use effective revision methods such as flashcards, blurting etc? Do you do practice questions? If it helps, Study mind has tons of free bio resources from revision notes to practice questions by topic.

I hope this helps!
Milena
UCL PFE
Study Mind

Hello and thanks for replying.
I have recently came up with a new method which consists of those steps:
1) I watch every video that BioRach posts on youtube and i make notes.
2) I reread them to make sure i understand them.
3) Any information she doesnt teach i will access on the textbook and take further notes, or watch freescience lessons.
4) I do past paper questions.

Thanks for the site, i appreciate it.

Reply 6

Bayou_60

1

Original post by Manos00

We've got pretty much 4 months until the end of year 12 and biology is not a very strong subject for me right now. I take chemistry, spanish and an EPQ as well and my predicted grades are B for both chemistry and spanish, but for biology it goes down to a D :frown:

. Is there anything you guys could suggest that would grow my grade significantly? The way i study doesnt seem to be working and it is kinda frustrating at this point. Thanks!

Hi! Ive been using StemUp for flashcards since the beginning of the year and they have been so useful to me as they contain everything condensed and specific to mark schemes as well as past paper questions

Reply 7

alspals2006

Original post by Manos00

We've got pretty much 4 months until the end of year 12 and biology is not a very strong subject for me right now. I take chemistry, spanish and an EPQ as well and my predicted grades are B for both chemistry and spanish, but for biology it goes down to a D :frown:

. Is there anything you guys could suggest that would grow my grade significantly? The way i study doesnt seem to be working and it is kinda frustrating at this point. Thanks!

no stop we're doing literally the same subjects to the T - what boards are you doing?

Reply 8

OP

Original post by alspals2006

no stop we're doing literally the same subjects to the T - what boards are you doing?

lmaoo im doing AQA for Spanish and OCR A for chemistry and biology, what about you?

Reply 9

OP

Original post by Bayou_60

Hi! Ive been using StemUp for flashcards since the beginning of the year and they have been so useful to me as they contain everything condensed and specific to mark schemes as well as past paper questions

I will give that a try, thank you very much!!

Reply 10

alspals2006

Original post by Manos00

lmaoo im doing AQA for Spanish and OCR A for chemistry and biology, what about you?

oh gosh totally different - im doing edexcel for spanish and chem and aqa for bio lmao. what texts are you doing for spanish? im doing como agua (and something else to be decided).

also regarding revision for biology the way ive been doing it is i go over my hw questions and see where i make mistakes. then i read over my notes (zhtutorials does amazing notes and theyre super cheap too) and give the questions another go. for new stuff or for test revision ill do some blurting, write out flashcards using the spec (so important i cant stress it enough), and then just do ppqs! hope everything goes well!

also i know we have different boards but im more than happy to discuss revision / send notes / chat - this combination of subjects is so rare so im glad to find someone that does the same as me :smile:

Reply 11

OP