Biology super cram - is this possible?

[snazzlefrag]

Yeah, I think you can do this! Get the basics down

Agreed,

I haven't taken this exam personally. However, if I was in your position Back2school, and had only a few days to prepare, my strategy would be to pretty much ignore the complex stuff and spend all my time REALLY MASTERING the basics and average difficulty stuff.

On any of these exams, you will find that MOST questions are statistically of average difficulty (let's say 60% of all the questions). Then on either end you might find 20% are easy and 20% are really difficult. As a result, if you have mastered the easy and average material, you could theoretically answer 80% of all the questions on the exam, without EVER needing to know the really hard stuff.

Of course, it is unlikely you would answer ALL 80% correctly....but the good news is that, in general, you only need to score around the 50%+ mark to pass these exams. That gives you quite a bit of grace. Right?

As for the exam itself, I would strongly advise you to SKIP any questions that go over your head. Invest your time on the questions you CAN answer. Go through the entire exam answering as many of the easy/average questions as you can and MARK those that you skip. THEN, if you have time at the end, go back and attempt the more difficult questions that you skipped and marked on the first run through.

The reason this is useful is that each question is worth EXACTLY the same number of points. You can spend ten minutes figuring out a really hard question...and score one point. Or you can skip it to quickly answer five easy/average questions in the same amount of time...and score one point for EACH.

In addition, skipping to the easy questions on your first run through will boost your confidence and help to calm your nerves in the beginning of the exam. Then, at the end of your time, you will probably be in a better mindset to go back and attempt a few of the hard ones you skipped earlier.

By that point, if you have studied hard and learned the easy and average difficulty stuff, it won't matter much whether you answer the hard ones correctly. As time begins to run out on you, you can play the odds game and simply GUESS on the remaining questions. You will not lose points for guessing (and you might score a few extra points along the way)...but you will definitely lose all those points if you don't select any answer.

Hope this helps.

Do well,
Snazzlefrag