Mr W's AP Bio Exam Preparation Tip # 1

SUMMARY
Two tips for reviewing for the AP Bio exam.

Before we start, here’s something to avoid. Don’t study by rereading the highlighted text you might have in either your notes or your textbook. Highlighting is a bad strategy for promoting learning in the first place. As a study strategy, rereading highlighted text is a TERRIBLE study strategy. It makes you overconfident because you feel like you know the content, when in fact you might still have a lot of work to do.

Instead, you should self diagnose your strengths and weaknesses, and then do RETRIEVAL PRACTICE. Self diagnosis is straightforward: go through a course outline, and identify what you do and don’t know. There’s one on my website (link in bio), and you undoubtedly also got one from your teacher. Go through it and use the three second rule. If you can’t start an explanation of a topic within three seconds, then you don’t know it. Mark it for review.

After you’ve identified what you don’t know, use retrieval practice. Flashcards are a great example of these. However, you’re going for long (several sentences) responses. No one word answers.
My Biomania quizzes are a great way to both self diagnose and do retrieval practice. Biomania is both an app on the Apple store, and you can find them as review quizzes on my website (link in Bio).