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How to get A* in a-level biology

Hi
I do OCR A ALEVEL biology and I am in year 12 and i have been struggling to achieve a grade A* as this is needed in the university I want to apply to so can anyone give me some tips or anything useful that will help me to get A* in biology.

Reply 1

Teribblestudent

Original post by smileyorange

Do lots of past paper questions and look at what the mark schemes want

Reply 2

Ghostlady

Bio Rach on you tube for anything from topic 8 (heart /fish etc onwards), Ameoba sisters on you tube for enzymes biochem and cell division.
I did alvel biology many moons ago and helped daughter who has just done her ocr biology alevels.
Also Miss estruch you tube for the biology maths side of things and how to interpret information.

We also did silly things to remember stuff:
like example propeties of Water = WAPSSCC Water is Adehesive, Polar, Solvent, Surface tension, Cohesive, Coolant.

100% make notes on the topic to try and condense it down in a way you understand. She had a3 pieces of blank card where she would have notes.
Transcription and translation is good to just make notes on its own for year 12 test/mocks, but towards the end of year 13, start adding to it all the other new year 13 topics such as the pre Mrna, the splicing, introns and exons into like a time line , including protein modification in the golgi and exocytosis so ti becomes like a storyline from start to finish. We added little drawings whats going on to make it more visually appealling rather than a lot of words.

past papers if you do unified biology this will help you think outside the box when it comes to biology. you can see how one topic can link to another. She also bought snap revise flash cards around christmas of her year 13 as well which helped.

Topics 10 and 11 is to do with biodiversity and phylogenic trees, collecting data, homologous divergent, anologoous convergent. Its a very wordy topic, so we picked out the the terms and written a short definition of them all onto one piece of card and she got me to test her by either reading definitiion or asked what such and such meant.

Just by changing it up a bit by doing different methods of revision, it worked for her as it stuck better in her head rather than it being monotone read read read all the time.