A-Level Biology Week 4 Exam Preparation Tips

Hello! I hope the revision has been going well.

Today we will look at exam time management. Many students face a problem with running out of time in the exam or having to rush through the last few questions at the speed of light, internally screaming. How can we prevent this?

Do you remember that terrible Biology mock I mentioned last week? One major problem for me was time management when it came to writing my answers, I spent so much time on the two mark questions at the beginning of the paper, that I ran out of time for the six markers at the end. I realised I had to deal with this if I wanted to get the grades I was after in my finals. So, I sat down and got hold of all the past papers I could, including questions from school, online, from the back of my textbooks, from my revision guides, anything and EVERYTHING.

I worked out that my exam board usually gave one minute per mark in an exam. Then I began to be ruthless with myself. I’d start to time my answers based on the number of marks the question had. So for a 4 mark question, I’d give myself 4 minutes. As I practiced I began shortening the time, until a 4 mark question would take me 2 minutes. By doing this and speeding up I was able to give myself a buffer in the real exam, so I could have a little extra time for super hard questions and also check my answers once I finished the paper.

Now you may be thinking this sounds impossible, but it really isn’t! Start small, try to start reducing the amount of time you spend on questions, avoid overly long paragraphs and focus on key bullet points for the key things you need to write.

My recommendation would be to start slowly on this, though. Gradually start decreasing the time rather than slashing it by half straight away. Remembering to actually time yourself is key so use a timer on your phone, once you can do 4 marks in 4 minutes, aim for 3 minutes and 30 seconds, then 3 minutes and so on.

This is something I say a lot, but if you've just completed a few questions within the time limit or even below it, reward yourself! These are minor accomplishments that we take for granted.

Let’s look at a question:

Four marks again, but the space given is massive. Honestly, I feel like this is just a trick examiners use to confuse us into writing way too much information, causing us to waste our precious time!

I have mentioned using bullet points in your answers before, and I will explain this in more detail next week, but let’s take a brief look at this now. Essentially, we have been given the structure of our answer in the two bullet points above. All we need to do is expand on these bullet points. Keep in mind that they have said ‘define’, not describe. This is a huge difference. If they used ‘describe’ a longer answer would be appropriate. However, here we simply have to define it in a couple of sentences, like a dictionary definition.

Then they have said explain and because this is right after defining, you still have to keep your answer relevant to the definition you have given. Overall, 4-5 lines of writing would be more than enough.

The real reason they give us so much space is so that we have room to re-write our answers if when we’re checking them at the end we realise we made some massive fatal error and the whole answer needs to be restarted.

Have any questions about how to prepare for your A-Level exams? Having problems with any hard to understand content or tricky past exam questions? Then ask Syed. Syed will be hosting a series of Q&A webinars in the 2 weeks before final exams. Post your questions here, and Syed will answer them in these sessions.