Biology - answering Exam questions!!?

craxsham

hi.. im a repeat student and studying at home.... and i took biology as a new subject...:cool:
after i studied most of the course...i started revising it by answering the exampaper questions.. with the help of marking scemes..
but the problem is... my friend told me that answers on the making scemes are not good enough for the exam.. not even if i make them in to sentenses... n that i need to write paragraphs n elaborate Alot of stufff which is mentioned in the exampapers. esp in section C.. So is that trueeeeeeeeeee???????????????:eek::eek::eek:

i thot that all science subjects needed specific words in their answers to gain full marks :S..
i really thot i was gonna get an Agrade in bio
thanks For ur time... :rolleyes:

JohnG18

For section C you can really go about it in different ways. I generally used diagrams if viable with very brief explination to show I understood. For questions where a diagram isn't suitible I personally wrote short concise sentences with only relavent information to illustrate to the examiner that I knew what I was talking about. Although I only got a B so I wouldn't take my word as Kimballs(nerdy jokes are the best).

Back Prince

my biology teacher got very annoyied at me at my mocks. He said when he see's paragraphs, he knows it is waffle. Then called my a lazy **** and stop betting in class so dunno if he was serious

Piste

craxsham wrote: »

hi.. im a repeat student and studying at home.... and i took biology as a new subject...:cool:
after i studied most of the course...i started revising it by answering the exampaper questions.. with the help of marking scemes..
but the problem is... my friend told me that answers on the making scemes are not good enough for the exam.. not even if i make them in to sentenses... n that i need to write paragraphs n elaborate Alot of stufff which is mentioned in the exampapers. esp in section C.. So is that trueeeeeeeeeee???????????????:eek::eek::eek:

i thot that all science subjects needed specific words in their answers to gain full marks :S..
i really thot i was gonna get an Agrade in bio
thanks For ur time... :rolleyes:

Maybe what your friend meant was that it's not enough to write just the key words in your answer, you have to explain them and put them into sentences. In the paragraph you write you might have 8 points of information and there might be 3 marks going for 5 points so the examiner will look at your answer and find the key words in each sentence until you have 5 points made (assuming they're correct).

Using marking schemes to mark your paper is fine as long as you realise that the marking scheme is just supposed to be a concise version of what you've written.

MissRealist

There are different kinds of section C's in my opinion. Some require single words where others require elaboration.

Our biology teacher's rule tends to be if you know more write it down if not keep your pen to yourself. Expanding once you're certain what you're writing is correct makes a good Impression on the examiner where as waffle is bad bad bad!

The marking scheme is often the very very bare bones of everything. Biology isn't like the other science subjects in that there isn't ONE single answer, there's a multitude and quite often you'll receive marks for correct answers not contained in the scheme and lose them if you aren't saying enough about the ones there.