A-Level Biology was probably the most irritating subject to me at the beginning. No matter how much revision I did, I kept forgetting specific terminology or points that I needed to know to score marks in my mock exams. Due to the first lockdown, my Year 12 experience was cut short, and the content became even more overwhelming as we were set many chapters to complete for self study. I would keep weighing my textbook and scaring myself into how much I needed to revise for my A-Level exams. 3 months into Year 12 I was predicted a D, then a C, and in the beginning of Year 13 I was predicted a B.
I was absolutely upset when I was predicted a B for my UCAS application as I needed an A to apply for medical school. This was the point where my extreme motivation and drive stemmed from- to prove my predicted grade wrong, and get the A I needed to get into medical school! On the other hand, my best friend aced her mock exams and was predicted an A*. Whilst I was extremely happy for her, I was also keen to know how she managed to do so well in her mock exams as we were both predicted a C at the start of the year. It was through her tips and advice was I able to implement them and start seeing a difference in my performance.
I've summarised them below, as well on my Instagram post, but I hope you find them useful!
1) Active Recall
At the start of Year 12, I was lost on how to revise. I experimented pretty much all types of methods- Cornell note taking, physical flashcards, pretty mind maps etc. These all took hours to make, and by the end of making them, I only retained about 1% of the knowledge in my head. It was only about 7 months before my A-Level exams did I "discover" online flashcards.
I'm a fast typer so making a deck of flashcards in my independent study periods was easy as it is, and then I went home to actually learn them. Because they were online, I couldn't lose them, let them get damaged by water or even care about how pretty or aesthetic they looked. And the wonderful aspect of the online flashcards was that it had a system where I ranked my confidence on the topic from 1 to 5, and based on my score it calculated a time period to review the topic again- also known as "spaced repetition". In this way I couldn't ignore the topic I didn't want to learn, as the app would tell me exactly what I needed to review.
Now there are a range of apps you can use for the online flashcards such as Quizlet, Brainscape, Anki etc. I wouldn't recommend Anki for now as it is quite complex to get used to unlike the others- it took me about 3 months to get used to it in med school! I personally liked Brainscape and it was my go to app during revision. If you want to be smart and save your time making flashcards, you can google flashcards for your exam board and use someone else's pre-made cards to revise.
2) Using a whiteboard
Whilst you can just memorise and recall key words, understanding certain concepts is extremely important when it comes to Biology. Especially when a 6 marker comes up on a topic in your final exams. Whilst experimenting what revision methods worked for me, I really loved using a whiteboard. I purchased a A4 sized one from Amazon, and would blurt out concepts that I couldn't get my head around e.g glycolysis, oxidative phosphorylation. The more I would go over it, the easier it became to understand. I would literally talk to myself in my room, teaching myself the concept by drawing the Krebs cycle and explaining what happens next. If you have siblings sit them down and teach them the topic, because the more you do, the more you understand it yourself and become confident.
3) Past papers!
One of the common myths is that A-Level Biology is easy to do well in, as the grade boundaries are lower compared to Chemistry. At the beginning you won't understand why, but as you do class assessments, the realisation will hit. It's because the mark scheme is probably created from the depths of hell, with the specificity of the marks given being so so precise. The reason why I didn't do well in my mocks was simply because I didn't do enough papers to wrap myself around the mark scheme and understand what it was asking for. It's easy to memorise and understand concepts, but to apply it, is another thing. Many of the biology papers won't directly ask you the concepts; instead they will give some sort of case e.g a condition and ask questions on it, based on your knowledge of the topic. That is why it is so easy to lose marks with Biology.
Also, if you're preparing for mock exams, don't do topic questions separately- do set past papers so you attempt questions from all range of topics, even if you haven't learnt all of them yet. The more papers you complete, the more familiar you become with your exam board, they literally become your best friend. My go to website for all past papers, topic questions and revision notes was physicsandmathstutor.com.
4) Specification
At last but not least, ensure you read up on the specification for your exam board. How will you know what to revise for if you don't look at your exam boards specification? The exam board website will also have some really good quizzes for topics- I did OCR and they had mini quizzes for individual topics which were helpful for the multiple choice section of the exam paper. Some of the students in my class printed out the whole specification from the website, which was probably about 100 pages long and killed about a rainforest of trees- you don't need to do that. Instead, you can create an Excel page and as you go along with learning the topics in school, copy and paste the specification onto Excel. In this way, you can colour code each specification either green, amber or red and assess your confidence on the subtopics. This really helps with revising for the final exam, you'll be able to know which topics to review back on in greater or less detail.
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