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A-Level Biology help

Hello, I'm posting this on the attempt of getting some advice on how to do better in the subject. Biology is by far the subject I revise the most, I spend hours memorising concepts and generally I don't really struggle to understand anything on the topics. However, when it comes to exam questions, I am unable to answer them if they're not simple knowledge questions. I never get any marks on suggest questions, analysing experiments (such as conclusions, how to make them better and all), and any other question that requires a lot of logical thinking and connecting one idea from topic 2 to another from topic 4. When I try to answer exam questions, I always end up getting really frustrated because I'm trying my best but it's not being enough as I'm almost never able to understand them. This has been shown in my PPE grades, I went from an A to getting a C most recently, which is terrifying for me because I was aiming to get an A*. Is there something wrong with me? Maybe I wasn't made for Biology, how can I get my grades up? It feels like there's barely any time left at this point, what do I do to answer these logical questions better and do well with exam questions?

Reply 1

HT_3105

Original post by ZecaPagods

I can assure you that you aren’t the only one going through that at the moment. Loads of other people will be going through the same thing right now. One thing that you could try is in your notes try linking different topics together. For example I saw a question earlier which asked: how does inslin effect the rate of respiration in cells? To answer this question you need to think synoptically. The release of insulin causes glucose in the blood to be converted to glycogen at which point it can be stored and used at a later point in time. Now we can link this to respiration because we know that glycolysis is the first stage of aerobic respiration and in glycolysis, glucose is converted to pyruvate. With less glucose in our blood, we cannot respire at the same rate we can with more glucose in the blood, therefore less glucose means less respiration in cells. The key to doing well in biology is to practice your active recall using spaced repetition, and make sure you practice your practical questions as well as your synoptic link questions. There are certain methods you can learn for doing evaluate questions etc

Hope this helps