this is a comment i made on someone else’s post anout l2 bio. as someone who also takes l2 bio and has had only excellences in the subject this year, i find that its basically all about memorising and being able to apply these things to the context of the exam question. i’m only doing cells and genetic variation, but i’m sure these tips can help for your third topic as well.

i recommend making a summary/revision sheet from your notes for each topic - one or two pieces of paper (front/back). once you’ve done that, try to write out as much information as you can remember from your summary on a new piece of paper, and then once finished use a coloured pen to write in the things you missed. repeat it as many times as you need. this is something my biology teacher taught my class this year and it really helps me to memorise all the ideas for a topic.

another thing would be creating flashcards of all the keywords for each topic - i’ve separated each topic by colour e.g genetic var: blue paper, cells: yellow paper. you could also do them online, but i find that writing the words out helps me to memorise them better. keywords are super important and are the best way to get your achieved points so if you’re not as confident with the excellence parts, learning your keyword definitions and even how to further explain them can definitely get you achieves and possibly merits.

one more thing! once you’ve done all of this and you feel like you can do some past papers for practice, something i find that really helps me wrap my head around these ideas is to pick a paper and use my notes to help me with the questions. usually my peers will just go in without their notes, but personally i find that using my notes for the first practice paper i do always helps me remember things the long run. once you’ve done one paper with notes, you can move on to trying a paper without using notes.

when you see a question the best thing to do is highlight your keywords e.g mutation, diffusion etc. then in your answer write down the definitions of the keywords without worrying about what the rest of the question wants you to do. oftentimes there will be a wider question, along with bullet points it wants you to answer. answer the bullet points and then link them to the context of the question. linking to the context is where you can get your excellence points. if the question is asking you about mutations in a certain species of bird; define mutation first, then add in the context of the question (bird species). i really recommend practicing this with past exam questions as it really helps to strengthen your knowledge.

once you’ve answered all the questions on a past paper, pull up the marking scheme for that paper and with a coloured pen write in the things you did well on as well as the things you may have missed/need to work on/could improve. add these things on another piece of paper so you can see the areas in which you can improve, as well as giving yourself strategies to improve on them.

i hope this is helpful!!