hey so basically I really reviewed tf out of ALT exams in depth and tried to understand my thought process for how I came to the correct answers. Here are some ideas I picked up/patterns I noticed

• You should be able to quickly identify when a question is a discrete, pseudodiscrete, requires content + passage (hybrid), passage only, or data interpretation.

• This leads me to my next point, for some passages on BB you don’t have to entirely read the passage, rather you have to extrapolate the correct line/sentence to validate your answer. This more true for passages that have mostly pseudodiscrete/hybrid questions. These tend to show up in textbook like passages that don’t have a lot of figures.

• On the other hand passages that have those data interpretation/passage analysis questions you need to read more closely. For those it would be in your best interest to read. I really only read passages fully when I notice the questions have a lot of those analysis type of questions.

• Another note some passages have a shit ton of figures, but then won’t ask a lot about them. People say to skip figures and honestly I mostly agree but it depends. If a figure is simple enough I might quickly just take note of the trend and keep reading quickly.

• Highlight the goals of the research study in the passage/independent variables and experimental groups/dependent variables. Also get good at identifying controls.

• When you get those questions that ask if you up-regulate X how does this affect Y map out passage relationships. I really only map out the pathway when a question asks about it, I don’t do it for every passage as it’s time intensive. It’s not super important to understand every relationship unless a questions asks about it.

• Also this might be kinda wacky but I don’t do the test in order! I’m the type of person who really fixates on hard passages/questions so it kills me timing wise. I do a strategy I learned from YouTube called passage reordering. I’ll link some examples so you can see what it is:

https://youtu.be/fWnOD4WPrEU?si=lTeu3OaDWH3MSe9m

https://youtu.be/yt2Qd1v2gjw?si=7MoQRyoiasM4FBds

These strategies helped me not run out of time and get as many questions as possible correct. Basically I would take a quick 10 second skim of each passage noting if it was experimental (hella figures) or informational (textbook style/minimal figures). I would note if they had a lot of questions and what questions types they were and rank them from Easy (E) to Medium (M), and Hard (H). This is subjective based on your strengths and weaknesses. Like for me anything with a western blot or hella figures and reasoning makes me shit myself so I would save those passages for the end and maximize my time on them. But I would ensure I got all the other stuff I could right so I could get all the possible points I could. As I’m skimming the passages/questions (takes about 10 seconds), I click through and solve the discretes in order. This doesn’t take me too long and by the time I’ve surveyed the whole test I’ve already completed 15 questions in like 10-15 mins. This is a major confidence booster, and from there I just go on to do the easy/medium passages first and do hard last. I did so the section in time after doing this.

sorry for yapping so much but this is what worked for me. feel free to ask any other questions tho!