GCSE Biology Week 2 Exam Preparation Tips

Wow, it’s been a while! Time flies when you're having fun, and reading my blogs is fun, right? So, let’s level up this week: notetaking!

Even if that’s a forceful smile, know that GREAT things lie ahead! Whether you like to keep everything digital or not, there are still multiple efficient ways of writing up notes. The three techniques which worked for me are as follows:

Revision Guides

Okay, don’t break the bank on these. But revision guides are sometimes the easiest and best source of revision, especially if you are wanting to memorise a process or information for a lab-based question. These guides have consolidated all the required information into a smaller book, which makes your life a lot easier. When you just can’t bring yourself to pick up that huge textbook anymore, it’s time to get yourself a revision guide instead!

You may be asking, what have revision guides got to do with notetaking? Revision guides are designed to present the key information as concisely as possible, so you can easily write these up as flashcards or include them in your own notes. It can even help in writing up a cheat sheet, which you can just stick around in your room or house.

Notetaking

In our Biology exams, we need to write points, not paragraphs, so why bother memorising chunks of text? Online notes, revision guides, and your own writing skills can help you get concise notes. Once that is done, try writing up a question based on your notes. You can even look through the past papers and find questions relevant to what you have just written down then add these questions next to your notes.

By doing this, you will make sure you are ready for any sort of question they might throw at you in the exam. If you create your own questions, you will be leading yourself, which can be more fun than just starting at a piece of paper or at the screen repeating the same question again and again. Be your own leader!

Posters or cheat sheets

Time to get creative! Boring notes are the worst, and most of us can’t bare them. I know I can’t. Now that we have our notes or maybe our flashcards, we can add this information to a single sheet of paper. Creating our cheat sheet!

The cheat sheet doesn’t have to look like the ones above!

Don't do the above, it's far easier to get organised digitally. We are in 2023 after all so if you like to make your notes on papyrus if you fancy helping save the trees! However you make them be sure to keep them organised.

Another idea is to put these up around your room and read these whenever you pass by. You can even put these up around the house if your parents don’t mind.

Whatever you do, just make sure you stick them up in a safe space somewhere your siblings aren’t going to wreck them. Personally I had all my cheat sheets stuck up on my wall and we had a leak and well... you can figure out what happened next. Needless to say, it turned more into Marine Biology. The point is, be careful where you stick these up! Make sure it’s somewhere you’ll actually see them and they won’t get destroyed.

That’s it for now but I’ll see you again for some more Biology tips!

Have any questions about how to prepare for your GCSE 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.