Tagged: revision

Two days to go before the EdExcel IGCSE Biology paper 2

I’m writing this on Friday evening and the 2018 IGCSE Biology paper 2 is on Monday.  So you are almost there…..

What can you do in the final two days?

  1. Look over the topics that can only appear in paper 2 and make sure you understand them as well as you can.
  2. Look at my post with some guesses as to what topics were not assessed on paper 1 and make sure you understand them as well as you can.
  3. One last work through those topics in the specification where you know your knowledge or understanding is not great (don’t waste time this weekend going over things you definitely already understand!)
  4. Rest properly, get two proper nights’ sleep so you are relaxed and ready to THINK in the exam on Monday.  You will need some downtime this weekend to enjoy yourself and switch off thinking about exams…..

Good luck to you all!  Your study of GCSE Biology is almost over… I will have my fingers crossed that the exam paper on Monday allows you to demonstrate the detailed knowledge and understanding you have built up

How best to organize your revision time in the Easter holidays: some PMG tips

Tomorrow is the first day of the 2018 Easter holidays and so it is definitely a good time for Y11 students to think about how they are going to make the most effective use of the time available for revision.  I know that everyone works differently but I thought I would write a post to give you something to think about….  Please leave a comment at the end of this post if you find any of this useful.

Starting Points:

Easter holidays are a critical time for Y11 students.  The IGCSE and GCSE specifications contain so much content that the challenge for you is mostly one of being on top of so much material come exam day.  And your exams arrive so early in the summer term that there won’t be much time when you get back to school after the holidays.  So it has to be now! (The summer will be very long and there will be plenty of time for lazy days when nothing at all happens…. )

The hardest thing about revision is getting started.  If you can build up some early momentum, you will be able to keep your energy and enthusiasm up right through the holidays.  So why not start tomorrow…..?

How to organise a revision plan

  • It is vital you have a plan.  A little time this evening or tomorrow morning spent on getting organized will be time well spent!  This would be how I would do it if I could rewind the clock to the summer of 1987….. U2 released The Joshua Tree that year and I thought at the time it was the greatest music ever made….
  • Speak to your parents tonight and ask them to talk you through what’s coming up in the holidays.  What family commitments do you have that will impact on your revision schedule?
  • Count up how many days you will be able to work between now and when school starts again.  For my current students, we have 25 days before term starts.  But I think you need a few days off at times in the coming weeks.  So let’s say, there may be 20 “work” days.
  • This is how I suggest you organise a “work day”…. You always do work in the morning session (9am-11.30am) and then you choose either the afternoon slot (2-4.30pm) or the evening slot (7.30pm – 10pm).  This is an ambitious schedule as 5 hours work in a day is quite a lot.  But let’s aim high!
  • Each session is divided into 5 periods of 30 minutes.  You must work on a different subject in each period in a session.  Have a plan before the session so you know exactly what you are going to achieve.  The next bit is very important.  At the start of the session, switch your phone off and put it in a different room.  Start a kitchen timer (not a timer on your phone obviously!) and set it to 25 minutes.  Work at your revision until the alarm goes off.  Then you get a 5 minute gap (tea/check Snapchat) before the next slot starts.
  • The PMG schedule has two huge advantages:  firstly you have completed half your work for the day by 11.30am (which feels good, believe me) and secondly you can enjoy the time you are not working without feeling guilty…. This is a key component to a successful revision programme. Work when you are supposed to be working but then do other stuff, see friends, do some exercise , watch tv, relax.  Revision isn’t effective if you are tired or bored so both must be avoided at all costs.

Many of you have 9 or 10 subjects to revise.  If we assume 10 subjects to revise (which makes the Maths easier) 20 work days in the holidays and 10 periods per day (see schedule above), this means that you have 20 periods per subject in the holidays.  Do the calculation with your numbers so you know how many revision tasks you need to plan per subject.    My example gives you 8 hours 20 minutes per subject – your job is to make the very best use of this time so you gain the most from it.  I wish you all the very best of luck and don’t forget to leave a comment below.  Happy revising!

Revision strategies for IGCSE Biologists

Holiday revision: some PMG tips for Y11 students to maximise the effectiveness of their work 

The post above was written a couple of years ago for my Y11 students embarking on Easter revision.  I know that some of my current 5th formers are working this week so I thought I would re-post it.  Some things have changed since 2015 (notably the sad demise of Zondle) but the key principles remain…. I hope it helps!

Well done!

Well done to everyone who has now finished their 2017 IGCSE Biology course.  I hope paper 2 was to your liking (it seemed pretty typical to me) and all the hard work you have put in over two years has finally paid off.  I guess that many Y11 students will be almost finished so it is nearly time for you to have a long, relaxing summer break.  I wish you all the best of luck when the results come out in August.

Can I ask for one small favour before you switch off schoolwork completely?

If you have time, please can you leave a comment below with any tips you have as to things you have done in revision that really helped you.  I imagine you have learned a great deal about how to motivate, organise and maximise your own learning over the past few months so why not leave a short comment to inspire/enthuse/help those that follow you……?

My page settings require me to approve any comment before it appears so don’t expect to see your comment straightaway as it may take an hour or two before it becomes visible.

But I hope you all have a brilliant summer and I wish you the best of luck!

IGCSE Biology 2017 paper 2 predictions

This post starts with a massive proviso of course.  Making predictions as to which topics might appear in a future exam is a very risky business.  The paper 2 you will all sit after half term can test material from the entire specification (including all the specification points in bold) and there is absolutely no guarantee that topics tested in paper 1 may not reappear in some form in paper 2.

So the proviso is this:  the only way to be fully prepared for paper 2 is to revise the entire specification so that you are prepared for whatever the examiners might throw at you.

But having said that, it seems sensible to focus your revision for paper 2 onto topic areas that were not examined in paper 1.  If I were in your position, these are the topic areas for which I would be doing most of my revision in the coming weeks:

  • Respiration 2.33 – 2.37
  • Gas exchange in Plants 2.38-2.43
  • Transport in Plants 2.49 – 2.56
  • Transport in Humans 2.57 – 2.66
  • Kidney 2.68 – 2.76
  • Reproduction 3.1 – 3.12
  • Food Chains and Energy Flow 4.4 – 4.7
  • Nitrogen and Water Cycles 4.8, 4.10
  • Human Influences on Environment 4.11 – 4.17
  • Food Production (including fish farming) 5.1 – 5.9
  • Selective Breeding and Genetic Modification 5.10 – 5.16

The bad news is that this list above still forms a large proportion of the extensive EdExcel IGCSE Biology specification but the good news is that there are PMGBiology blog posts on all the above.  So please use the search function on my homepage to find material to help you revise.

Practice papers and mark schemes are available online (and for my students on the school Firefly page)

Keep working hard – you are almost there and the summer to come will be long and restful….

Final advice before iGCSE Biology paper 1 on Tuesday

Well we are nearly there….. 24 hours to go until the main IGCSE Biology exam (worth 120 of the total 180 marks).  I hope you are all excited and looking forward with optimism to being able to show the examiner how much you understand from the extensive specification.  What should you be doing in this final 24 hours?

The most important thing is that you all get a good night’s sleep tonight.  Please do not stay up late cramming -it does not work! The evidence base for this is completely clear: you will perform better tomorrow with a normal night’s sleep tonight.  So please stop work an hour before you intend to go to bed, relax for an hour watching TV or socialising and then go to bed……

This afternoon you should want to look over a paper or two to familiarise yourself with the kinds of questions and the mark schemes.  I would have a final look again at the summer 2015 and summer 2016 paper 1B scripts.  Look at your answers and the kind of ways you lost marks.   In particular focus on the longer answer questions (for 4,5 or 6 marks) and look at the mark schemes.  Often there are marks available for saying obvious things but only if the correct vocabulary is used correctly.

Remember the PMG list of banned words:

Amount (oh no, please don’t ever write this in an exam – think – do you mean mass/volume/concentration?)

Level (do not talk about the level of something, you always mean “concentration” and concentration is a noun that actually means something!)

Substance – what substance are you talking about?  oxygen? glucose?

Gases – in questions on gas exchange or transport, please do not write about “gases” – say which gases you mean!

Nutrients – not really a banned word but one that needs very very careful use…..  A nutrient is a food molecule, for example glucose, an amino acid or a lipid. Nutrients like these are transported dissolved in blood plasma in mammals but if asked about it, don’t use the word but actually state which molecule you are talking about.  None of these nutrients are absorbed into the roots of a plant.  Plants absorb mineral ions (nitrate, phosphate, magnesium, potassium etc) through their roots into root hair cells by active transport.

Look over your revision notes a few final times to familiarise yourself with the key words.  Focus your final revision on the key areas that you know will definitely come up:  there will be a genetics question, there will be an experimental design question, the chances are that fish farming and fermenters will be there as usual……..

If you have worked hard for several weeks (and I know many of you have) you have little to fear in the exam from a lack of knowledge.  The thing to fear is losing marks due to rushing, due to not reading the question and due to not giving yourself time to think.  None of you will be rushed for time I promise, so please

keep-calm-and-read-the-question-14

  • read every word in every question
  • give yourself time to think before answering – even easy marks can be lost by rushing!
  • plan longer answer questions to make sure you cover all the key points using the correct jargon – think before you write anything, “what are the key terms in this topic?” – and then make sure you use them correctly in your answer

Good luck!  By the end of tomorrow you will have completed two thirds of your GCSE exams in Biology and that should be a happy thought……

Three days to go…..

For those students following the EdExcel IGCSE Biology course there are now just three days to go until the paper 1.  This is the two hour exam covering all the specification (with the exception of the handful of content points in bold).  If you started revision early enough, you should know be feeling confident that you have the knowledge and understanding needed for whatever challenge the examiner might throw at you.  So how best to use your time in the final few days…?  It is a tricky question as the answer will vary for different people – you must always do what you think is best for you and your chances.

But if it were me, I would be trying to do the following:

  1. Have a go at as many past paper questions as possible over the weekend.  Answer the questions under exam conditions, then mark them yourselves using the mark schemes available online.  Pay particular attention to marks lost due to poor reading/interpretation of the question or poor-exam technique.
  2. Prepare yourself for the questions that you “know” will come up on Tuesday.  It is almost certain that there will be a genetics question to make sure you remember how to set out genetic crosses correctly.  There is always a graph to plot and questions asking you to describe the pattern in a set of results.  How can you ensure you always get full marks on these questions which require no biological understanding to answer?
  3. Look at the experimental design questions and continue to practise them.  Check over all the required practicals mentioned in the specification and ensure you understand how they work.

Finally on Monday night, please get an early night so you are refreshed and ready for a 2 hour paper.  There is no point doing hours and hours of last minute cramming as it simply doesn’t work.  If the Biology exam were like a Spanish vocab test then I would encourage you to spend four hours before the paper going over and over the material….. But your exam is going to require you to interpret data, to make suggestions and come up with explanations for things you haven’t seen before.    You cannot think clearly or concentrate fully on reading the question when you are exhausted.  So if you decide to cram, the chances are that many more marks will be lost through tiredness than will be gained by any short-term memory gains.

Please go to bed at a normal time on Monday night and wake up at a normal time on Tuesday morning.

And the very best of luck to you all!

Keep working hard…..

There are lots of you out there revising hard for your IGCSE Biology exams in May/June.  I can see because of a graph like the one below showing page views on the blog in every month from August onwards.  Let’s see if April and May 2017 can break records on PMGBiology and then with a little luck, your cohort of students can break the record for the highest proportion of A* grades ever awarded.

Screen Shot 2017-04-30 at 07.53.40

Banned Words in IGCSE Biology answers

There are one or two words which you should never use in your answers to IGCSE Biology papers.

  •  The boys I teach know that amount is a banned word.  If you find yourself writing amount, please cross it out immediately and think which of the following terms is actually the word you should be using:  concentration, volume, mass, number .

[Amount has a specific meaning in science:  it means the number of moles of a substance and seeing as you don’t need to know about the dreaded mole for Biology, it should never be used.]

Mole (this is a good photo of the dreaded mole)

  • Be wary of using the word nutrient without giving an example of what molecule you mean.  A nutrient is food molecule like glucose, amino acid or lipid.  When you are describing the things in soil that are absorbed into the roots and are transported in xylem, it is better to refer to them as minerals.

 

  • Level does not mean the same as concentration.  Don’t write about the level of oxygen when you mean concentration.

 

CORMS is dead: Long live DORIC

In Ancient Greece, the Doric order was one of their favoured architectural styles and offered the simplest way of decorating columns.. As you can see from the featured image, Doric columns have an undecorated square capital at their top.

I am sure you won’t get questions on ancient architectural styles in your GCSE Biology, but Doric (now DORIC) is perhaps a simpler way of remembering the key points to include in the experimental design questions in the exam.  I have written about CORMS before and there is nothing new in this post, simply a new acronym.

D stands for Dependent Variable.   This is what you will measure in your experiment.  The mark is often for how you plan to measure the dependent variable, how frequently you will take measurements etc.

O stands for Organisms.  What are the key variables relating to the organisms involved?  If using a living organism in your experiment (other than humans) often this involves using organisms of the same species, the same age and sometimes the same mass.  If you are using humans, you often need to standardise your groups for gender, health, age etc.

R stands for Repeats.  If you do more than one replicate of each set of conditions, it allows you to see how reliable your method is and also allows an average result to be calculated.  Think about how many repeats you think you would do: it depends on the experiment of course.  In a laboratory experiment, three might be sensible, if you are growing seeds to investigate germination, you might grow 200 identical seeds in a tray…..

I stands for Independent Variable.  This is the thing you are going to alter in the experiment.  So how do you intend to alter it and over what range?

C stands for Control Variables:  what are the variables that need keeping the same in every experiment in order to make the investigation a fair test?  Think what other factors might affect the dependent variable other than the one you are investigating.  And then think how you would keep them constant in an experiment.  I would suggest you need to identify at least two or three of the most obvious control variables to ensure you get full marks.

Simple!  DORIC is the new CORMS….