Studying biology, pain-free

Biology shouldn’t be a hassle to study. The same goes for chemistry and whatever subject is synonymous with “memorisation” these days. But those are arguments for another article.

Think about what you do during a biology study session. If “memorising notes”, “grinding”, and “highlighting” leap to mind, then you probably aren’t at maximal efficiency and you’re also suffering more than you have to.

When teachers tell you to “understand, not memorise”, you might wonder: how exactly are we supposed to score points in an exam without memorising the keywords??? Thankfully, that’s not what they mean.

Memorisation, as a studying strategy, is essentially hard-coding the information you need into your brain, word-for-word. This is what leads to your 6-hour study sessions, because trying to store all that information in your brain is an incredibly exhausting and time-consuming task. Instead, understanding involves the construction of links between the most important bits of information in your brain – keywords, answering techniques, and common errors – and discarding what’s unimportant.

Now, this seems like a fuzzy hodgepodge of buzzwords, so let’s first talk first about what makes up important information in biology exams, and then we can take a look at how to apply that to our studies.

Understanding, not memorising

Our first step to understanding biology is to find a way to comprehend the cause and effect of each phenomena. A lot of topics, such as gene control, enzyme action, cell signalling, infection, etc, can be understood via visualisation, for example.

More importantly, when trying to score in exams, we need to understand the keywords required for each topic. This is the fundamental aspect of marking in biology. No matter which answer key you look at, keywords will be highlighted for your reference. Being able to prioritise and keep track of these keywords will mean your memory work is significantly cut down – all you have to do is be able to link the concepts tested in the questions to the relevant keywords.

Just as important as remembering keywords is being able to recognise core keywords (required in every related question where the topic is tested,  as well as supplementary keywords that are required to earn additional marks in longer, in-depth questions. This ability to prioritise also falls under answering techniques, the general family of skills needed to tackle questions beyond just content knowledge alone.

Beyond the prioritisation of keywords, a second and possibly more important skill is that of pattern recognition among questions. Considerable effort has been put into designing questions that follow clear patterns, most notably using command words like “describe”, “discuss”, “explain”, and so on to demarcate basic expectations. Clear question archetypes have also been created that you ought to take note of during your practice. A whole article could be devoted to these!

A third aspect of answering techniques, which links to the first, is answering speed and concision, but this is something you can really only build up through practice.

Now, how do we organise our study sessions through this knowledge?

Studying effectively

The most important thing to have in mind when studying is a quantifiable aim. This sounds extremely obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times my fellow students have sat down just for the general purpose of “mugging”, without really thinking about, “Why am I doing this worksheet?” and “How much can I realistically and effectively finish, given this time?”

Before sitting down to “mug”, think about your aim for the day. Is it to build understanding of one specific topic, to apply answering techniques, or to analyse your past work for mistakes? Tailor the aim of your study session to what time and materials you have, and to where you feel you could best improve.

Following that, quantify your aim. Maybe, for example, you want to practice essay-writing skills, both to strengthen your speed and concision as well as spotting where mistakes can crop up in your writing. Given 90 minutes, you could aim to complete 2 essay questions (assuming you write quickly!), then mark those essays and take note of your errors. The important part is to have a concrete and realistic end goal, so that you won’t underutilise your time, but you also won’t end up rushing through an excessive amount of work in too short a duration.

Also consider where you are in the syllabus’ timeline. Have you just started learning a topic? It’s best to start by doing focused, topical practices to identify the most important keywords and structures to answer questions with. After a week or so, pulling out your main mistakes becomes essential, and you can commit this to a separate set of notes for mistakes.

This separate “mistakes” set is incredibly vital, because it’s only by combining what we know about keywords and where we fall short that we can prioritise which terms are really important and which are supplementary. We can also find out which answering techniques work more consistently than others.  This set of notes gives rise to one final set: key insights.

“Key insights” can take the form of flashcards or written notes, with the former being especially handy closer to the exam period. These will be the most vital scoring points for each topic.  Ask yourself: which terms are a must to get points, no matter what the question is? For a question archetype of this form, how exactly should I phrase my response?

While studying, you shouldn’t just be going through the motions. You must reflect on what you want out of every practice session, and how to efficiently distill the most vital parts of your learning onto paper.

One last piece of advice – sometimes, the longest you can study in a day is merely 2-3 hours. For some people, it’s because they have to wind down after a period of intense studying. For others, like myself, it’s a natural limit, and trying to work past that limit on a regular basis will cause burnout very quickly. But just because you see others around you working an insane number of hours, that doesn’t mean you must do the same. Instead, understand what works best for you. 2 hours of focused, effective, and strategic studying is much better than 8 hours of purely “grinding”.

Best of luck in your studying journey, and I hope this article has been of some help to you.