here's what to avoid: leaving bio to the last minute. keep your notes up, keep your memorisation up, keep your amount of practice questions up. i got complacent as the year progressed due to my high results and failed to study properly for trials. this resulted in my receiving a 75% and dropping down to rank 9. it was devestating.
As ermmmmwhat said above never keep biology to right before the test. I was rank 2 for the entirety of year 11(got 59 percent in the first task
) and am now rank 1 for year 12 AT1 and what has really helped was to get all the rote learning and memorisation done before the term starts (a
consistent hour a day for 2 weeks is way more than enough). Write all the notes and what really helped was doing a 10-15 recap before sleep most nights (reading out loud and memorising my notes). I personally liked handwriting my notes and making them look nice even though it takes a long time, but I felt it helped me to remember better. I can't talk for anybody else but using lots of different highlighters and coloured pens for each section really helped to break up walls of text and to make the notes more friendly.
Most important part is when school starts stay locked in. The mistake that cost me rank 1 in year 11 was also complacence. I had everything done so I was super distracted in class because I thought I could learn nothing more and eventually I got rusty. In my case with handwritten notes I started carrying a stack of sticky notes in my pencil case to add to the notes in case I heard anything new in class and compare what the teacher would say with my own knowledge. During that time when you go home I reckon try to spend about 30 minutes per day doing practice questions and 15 minutes with corrections in a different colour. Write advice for yourself to look back on the next few days. If you do this nearly every day its a really easy way to cram in about 15 hours or revision without it feeling like much. Trial and error is really the key to finding out what works so try to mark your work as strict as possible.
Also, I don't believe atomi is the best due to a substantial lack of detail that I have seen as I used it. I recommend using the textbook and someone elses notes from the hsc survival drive which most people have access to. Use the notes as kind of a reference of what's important and not because the textbooks do give a lot of unnecessary information and rarely they don't have enough on certain points. Your main reference should be the syllabus. Its also helpful to keep an AI at the ready not to copy, but to elaborate things and further your own understanding.
evaluate qs and esp the long answer ones i never knew how to structure
Practice practice practice, In biology knowing isn't enough but you must be as good at conveying. I don't do this myself but my teacher had advised me to get all those nesa verbs (explain, assess, evaluate) from the nesa website, write it on a paper and stick it to the wall.
Glossary of key words | NSW Government
Only annoying thins is finding what's used in biology hence my reluctance to do that but familiarize yourself with the common ones.
what did you do differently in exams that boosted your marks?
My favorite exam strat: Have fun during the exam! (I genuinely love bio so that probably doesn't apply to most)
how did you hit marking criteria / keywords instead of just dumping content?
For this practice comes in key. I do the hsc questions or questions I that I find in random drive folders, mark them and come back to them later. After marking and writing feedback for yourself try to make the response better, use better words, shorten unnecessary parts (use criteria whilst doing this) and eventually it should become habit whilst doing the questions.
and also in terms of actually learning the content and applying- how did u make the content actually go to ur brain and register so that u achieved the ability to answer questions and apply ur knowledge?? i take notes on atomi and my teachers slideshow but idk how to remember it
You have to keep going over the notes every day. And I find that teaching other people works (For once it pays to have friends who don't know what they're doing
)
And for case studdies most of them should be specified in syllabus im my experience they can give you questions about randome case studdies that you've brealy gone over but the point of those is apply information from other concepts, not necesarily memorising all the statistics of a case study. Stick really closely to the syllabus and branch out from there, honestly sometimes I do that and lose myself learning about content
This is probably all yap, but I've survived and "thrived" on this strat for the last year so main thing is find what works out for you and good luck!
