IB BIOLOGY: How to get a 7? | Sharing my study method

hey friends welcome to the channel and to the first video of the series where i go through my tips and tricks for getting a 7 in each of my iv subjects if you're new here my name is cindy i will be attending university to study biomedical sciences this fall in this channel i'll be making videos about ib my university live and study tips tricks so if you're interested consider subscribing for more of these content let's get right into the video for bio i wouldn't say it's one thing or another thing that got me a seven like at the end but i've done a series of things that helped me to understand the content at first helped me revise the content help me commit it to memory that i think affects like how i performed in exams so i'll be going through that process and hopefully you guys can learn some techniques i use to study bio and try to implement it in your own study routine so whenever i first study bio the first thing you need to do is get the conceptual understanding in your mind that means understanding the content before you commit it to memory i usually start with bioninja because i just like how it's organized but you can really use any textbooks to get your initial conceptual understanding it could be your teacher as well who's like teaching in class and that's when you first come into contact with the content and you start to form an initial understanding of what is being taught in the curriculum for me my teacher always assigns homework like to take notes before classes so my class she wants us to use cognitive but i find bio ninja to be my favorite textbook to look at so i use that that one you can just try out different textbooks see which one works for you the reason i use bioninja is because first it's organized in bullet points form which i really like because it tells me exactly what i need to know secondly there's always diagrams accompanied with it which is usually for most test books and the third one is that because it's an online textbook there's sometimes like short videos along with it as well which i find it very helpful when i try to visualize something in my mind if you're wondering which textbooks bio resources to use check out this video linked where i tried to rank all of my id bio textbooks i really spent a lot of time trying out different textbooks and see what works for me and i found out that bioninja worked the best when i first approached content i read through bioluminescent first i actually don't take notes and this is something some people might find surprising because don't you need to take good notes in order to be able to study well the reason i don't take notes for bio it's because bio ninja has organized them already for you so bio ninja is almost like a note already so there's no need for you to copy things down unless you want to copy it and compile it with other things you found in other textbooks and make your own notes that makes sense to copy it down but i found that when i make notes i'm just blatantly copying things down text by text and i'm not really processing it the way i want it to so therefore i found it to be a waste of time for me to write down things that's already written on the textbook it could be that i have a very bad note-taking habit that it doesn't help me as much to process content technically all the bio study guides and you can even find notes online people have already done notes for you so i found that there really isn't a need to make my own notes so after reading content i go into my class where my teacher teaches the content without any notes as well i just want to have a general idea it's okay if you have a committed things to memory you just need a general idea of what this chapter is teaching and what you need to know and another reason i don't take notes is because the way my teacher structures her class is that she prepares activities and i think she got most of them from in thinking which is a website organized by a very experienced group of ib teachers they always have like activities that help the students to like commit things to memory and like for example doing some popcorn like drawing some diagrams and like doing some small projects and things like that since we're already doing that in class i found that it might be more time effective i just used that period of time to commit things to memory and deepen my conceptual understanding rather than doing that outside of class and spending my own time where i could have been doing other things and focusing on other subjects so next i start preparing flashcards remember i said i don't take notes it means i don't take physical notes but i do in a way take digital notes in the form of flashcards i don't use anything fancy i just use quizlet and the reason i prepare flashcards is because i know that will be the method of how i study by using flashcards you force yourself to do active result which is basically you need to remember the content from scrap instead of like just reading through notes those notes are in front of you and you have the illusion that you already know everything when you try to remember it without any tips or clues it might be actually very difficult the more you force yourself to remember those content the more you're strengthening the neural pathways to do that and the easier it will be for you during exams to retrieve that content from your memory so in terms of flashcards the first thing i do is i try to formulate a question i the way i do that is i look at the ib biology syllabus for each chapter there's like bullet points which are all like syllabus targets and i just rephrase the syllabus target to make it a question basically just add in a command term for example in 4.1 under the topic ecology the first syllabus target is species are a group of organisms that can potentially interbreed and produce fertile offspring how to rephrase that into a question i basically just put the command term defined because this is obviously a defined question like it's the definition for the word species so i just put define species and i would expect myself to be able to regurgitate this sentence that i just read as the answer to this question guys this work because this sentence is literally the march scheme for one of the questions defined species in one of the past papers so trust me this process works um it might not be exactly the same as the ib biology questions that might come on during your exam but it's the best way to make sure you study everything and best way to make sure that you learn everything that the ibe syllabus wants you to do and if you don't want to do that yourself you can go to biologyforlife.com which is a website made by a very very experienced biology teacher under every syllabus target she made questions she made ib's style command type of questions if you just don't want to make any stuff just look at that one and try to answer that question from your knowledge and you can literally just do active recall without preparing your flashcard actually she made her own set of flashcards based on those questions and based on the ib oxford textbook which is amazing you can actually just rely on her flashcards i didn't know that website before i only knew like towards the second half of my second year of ib so when i was restarting i was making my own flashcards i do understand that some of her flashcards the answers might not cover everything i wanted to cover so i copy and paste it to my own factors and i add stuff to it so yeah it takes some time i mean like to just copy and paste and stuff but i think it takes a lot less time than copying down your notes and making like pretty notes for you to study that's just what i think so i just found that this method works for me i will link the flashcards i made down in the description as well so if you guys want to use it to study go ahead i'm not selling any of my flashcards because like i said none of it is original it's like copy and pasted from other websites i'm just reorganizing it in a way that works for me so if you guys want to use it go ahead click the link in the description box and you can access it for free basically every time i finish the content and i make the flash cards i basically just go over the flashcards over and over again until my unit exam [Music] another thing i found very helpful is you need to figure out what you're not good at in ib because there's no way for you to study every single thing the day before exam maybe for you an exam maybe that works for the actual exam there's no way you can't cram an entire ivy biology syllabus the night before exam so you need to really figure out what are your own weaknesses which topic do you feel least confident and that you definitely have to go through it over and over again before you go into your exam figure that out along the way how i do that is for you an exam i just use quizlet like i said so i just use the staring like feature on the upper right corner of the quizlet flashcard you can stare this flashcard and then you can look over it later basically i just go over the flashcards i stare all the flashcards that i'm not confident in and go through the stared flashcard if i feel that i'm already pretty confident in this topic i will just remove the star from it so that it becomes a normal flashcard and i just keep repeating that process until i streamline down to like this one or two flashcards that i feel least confident in what's good is that you revise the content that you're least confident in the most and you revise less of the topics that are easier that you're most confident in this really just ensures that you spend your time effectively only revising for the topics that you're not good at [Music] at least one week before my unit exam i start using past papers while i do past papers what i do in my brain is try to figure out the topic that ibis has on the most i rely past paper a lot like the mart schemes were passed river a lot as part of my notes and i just copy bullet points and mark schemes in the flash cards so when i look at it again it's all in the flash card if you do a lot of papers you'll notice that i really test students on some topics and they really like to test you on other topics if you only rely on past papers and you keep doing like the questions that ask topic that always comes out you will forget the topic that doesn't come out as much and if it does come out on your exam you will panic so i try to make a word document where i have all of my syllabus targets and i try to highlight the topics that don't come out as much or topics that i be almost never asked before i try to focus on that more before i go into my exam now you need to focus on topics that never came out before but might come out in an exam look at my cat okay so moving on what i said before was how i prepare for unit exams so now i want to talk about how i prepare for the actual exam if you follow my process of studying like exactly by the time you finish all the content and study for the actual exam you've already done a lot of studying to consolidate your knowledge so now you need to focus on topics that you're not good at and you you really need to just put trust in your long-term memory that you remember things that are more obvious what i did was along the way when i studied all the other unit exams i did a traffic light color coding method basically that tells me topics that i'm most confident in and topic that i'm least confident in and it's almost like a ranking skill i did red orange yellow and green so just four colors green is the topics that i'm most confident in and read is the topics that i'm least confident in over time you basically have this guide that tells you which stuff you need to study for rather than just blindly going through the entire ivy biology syllabus and wasting your time i just keep coming back to this topic of active recall and finding the topics that you're least confident in because i think just these two are the key to preparing most effectively for your ib biology exam so now let's move on to other tips which you might not know about how you can prepare for ib biology exams so the first thing is this is something i noticed so really let me know if i'm wrong ib they reuse the electron micrographs and they reduce some diagrams one of the most obvious example that i found out was that diagram about a male gamete in like different stages and how it develops into a sperm that diagram i think it's used at least three times so with that said what can you do if ib often reuse its electron micrograph label them figure out exactly what each layer is because sometimes when you look at electron micrographs and diagrams you'll doubt yourself it's often not that obvious as what's noted in biology textbooks where it's colored in your ib exams it will be black and white so if you encounter electron micrographs and diagrams when you're doing past papers label them talk to your teachers if you have to if the same diagram comes out again you have a lot more confidence in determining which layer is this is also a practice for you even though if the same electron micro graph doesn't come up use this process as a chance for you to practice labeling electron micrographs and practice identifying different layers i only thought about doing this in the last month before i go into my exam but if you're starting this curriculum soon or if you're still in your first year or you're starting your second year try picking it up i promise it'll benefit you the second thing i want to talk about is about database questions a mistake i commonly make is that i try to answer it like a section b question where it tells you to describe like you know i don't know like a mechanism a process or something because i've memorized so many things i feel like i'm just in that stage where i really want to just show the examiner look these are all the things i remember but i forget that it's not answering the question what you need to know is that for database questions all the questions underneath the database question is asking about the data and about the question that is given you'll just always have to refer back to it like whatever it asks even though it might be something that for example something about like hand physiology when you think you have to like talk about all the features that are related to camp physiology look back into the question and see which of those features relates to the question the most and that's probably the answer and unfortunately for database questions i don't think there's a lot of tips and tricks to it i can only say that i think it does improve over time as you do more database questions the only thing i can say is to practice i cannot find any other method that will help you do better in answering database questions and my third tip is to study with your friends there's a couple of things you can do you can quiz each other if you and your friends use different resources you can help each other to fill in the gaps which is so helpful i did that with one of my friends she's awesome she uses cognitivity the most while i use bioninja and the oxford textbook the most as we study together we're starting to notice that wait why do i have this in my nose while you did it so and then we just try to fill in each other's gaps the reason for you to do that is none of those resources are perfect there isn't a textbook where you can just memorize in everything and you can ensure that everything written in that textbook will be in the mark scheme for your ib exam if you're still in doubt about that go check out the video where i tried to rank ib biology resources i rambled so long about the weaknesses and the strengths of each of the textbooks i used i feel like everything i'm doing here are just those simple steps that you have to do over and over again even though it's very mundane but it's the repetition of those very simple mundane process that really helped me to just score well on this subject i hope you guys found this video helpful i hope you guys found some of the techniques uh study methods i used helpful to you as well let me know what i need to improve in my videos as well i would really appreciate the feedback if you do give me and leave them down in the comments and if you guys have any questions leave them down in the comments as well i will 100 respond to you guys see you in my next video where i'm talking about tok presentation essay and how i got a very surprisingly good mark on those of my two assessments so bye [Music]

Channel: Syndey Wong

Views: 37,441

Keywords: how to get a 7 in ib biology, how to get a 7 in ib biology hl, ib biology, how to get a 45 in ib, ib, how to get a 7, how to get a 7 in ib math sl, how to get a 7 in ib english, how to get a 7 in ib chemistry, how to get a 7 in ib chemistry hl, how to get a 7 in chemistry, how to get a 7 in chemistry hl, how to get a 7 in chemistry sl, how to get a 7 in ib biology sl, how i got a 7 from ib biology, how to get a 7 in ib psychology, ib study tips and tricks, ib results reaction

Id: T2-_-PEnqaI

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021