Check out our advice below from our DSE Biology Specialist

Transcript:

When it comes to DSE biology a lot of students in general find it relatively easy to study in terms of the concept, which is pretty true because a lot of principles and ideas and theories in biology, it's quite straightforward. If you compared to chemistry and physics.

But a tricky part for biology I would say over the years of teaching experience - two parts - the first part, where a lot of students always complain about as failing to write the answers with the specific keywords we've been marking a lot of years of papers submitted for our students and what we found is that sometimes as a marker what we see from our students writing a long paragraph of answers in the paper we can tell that the student have a general good understanding on the topic and on the concept but if they fail to write those specific terms that is required by the marking scheme then it's easy to lose a lot of marks even they've written a lot in the paper.

Take for example like a simple question why does enzyme doesn't work in 500 degrees Celsius for example let's say a human enzyme amylase so a lot of students what they would do it's high temperature, sensitive, denature and that's why it's not working. so if you look at this answer a lot of students will only receive one mark because they failed to mention their enzyme it's a protein, that's why it's sensitive to temperature, and in high temperature it denatures and as a matter of fact the active site is being destroyed and cannot bind to the substrate to form enzyme substrate complex and only by that the enzyme is not functioning and cannot catalyze the chemical reaction, so that's why if you are a student when you think back on these answers it's sort of easy to recall and to understand and to know what it means but are you able to write them out in the examination questions? That is the key so that's why this is the first part of lots of students find it challenging to answer the question with specific terms.

Secondly is the wide range of application, well compared to chemistry and physics, bio has more applications I would say. So for example if you learn like the elective Part Biotechnology, okay so you learned about like genetic engineering some techniques some methods and approaches and you will expect to see in the papers in the examination. However, they will use different cases that you seldom seen from your textbook , for example if you look at other international examination papers they might use anti frozen Tomatoes as a case study for genetic engineering or like you know adding additional nutritional values to corns by doing recombinant plasmid technology so that's why what you've seen in the textbook is not exactly what you will see on the papers. because they will use a lot of applications for example you learn about the gas exchange respiratory system in human and in exam they won't just say - describe the functions of alveoli, never I would say really rare occasion, because these are too straight forward you would expect to see questions for example like they're asking you about SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome which out broke in Hong Kong in 2003 and they will use these cases to indirectly assess your understanding on the gas exchange system in human beings.

So that's why as a summary be able to answer those keywords and be able to apply what you learn in different cases that you would expect to see in your textbook and in your real examination paper so that is our suggestion for how to prepare for your upcoming DSE biology. Good luck and schedule a trial with us! We'll definitely love to share your more about how to prepare an excel in your DSE biology

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