Hi,
I've just completed bio this year and obtained a study score of 45. I am telling you what I personally did; this may not be good advice.
Question 1: I personally did not use my notes and I resorted to using cue cards. But, I took information from a textbook (edrolo) and added additional information I obtained from my teacher (nelson textbook). This is so I would have a strong foundation of information, as in some cases nelson would miss out on information, vice versa.
Question 2: I have always incorporated practice questions into my study. I recommend from day 1 spoon feeding yourself exam questions (this is super underrated). Whilst you may be worried about wasting exam questions, you likely will not remember these questions you picked (I didn't), and it is better to build a foundation on how to structure responses earlier rather than later. I only started practice exams two months post-exam.
Question 3: You must always stay ahead of content if you are planning to score 45+. I recommend at least 2 chapters ahead, but over the summer holidays I completed the whole of unit 3 and was very comfortable with the content (I felt that this was a bit extreme).
Question 4: For pre-sac study I started revising 2 weeks before the actual sac. I did practice exam questions and cue cards. For pre-exam, I revised all my cue cards 3 months pre-exam and stopped using cue cards 2 months pre-exam. For the remainder of the time, I did practice exams from vcaa and other company exams; try to complete between 25-40 exams before the actual exam. For a 45+ you should only be loosing a minimum of 10 marks per exam (this is the amount of marks I lost on the actual exams; however, I really only lost 0-6 marks on average per exam, so try to aim for less than 10).
Question 5: I personally found evolution the hardest topic, though others say it is the easiest. It is very divisive as parts of it are purely common sense and cannot be taught. But, generally, the hardest topics are considered to be attenuation for the trp operon, insulin recombination and transformation, and possibly CRISPR. However, the aforementioned topics, excluding evolution, are all memorisation based, so once you memorise these processes (which are very long), you'll be sweet.
Question 6: I cannot emphasise this enough and not enough people know about this, but you MUST use the biology FAQ document. It ensures that you do not learn content that you do not need for the exam, sacs are different. This saves so much time and is arguably more important than using the study design.
I know this may sound contradictory to the aforementioned point, but extend yourself beyond what VCAA requires. Now, whilst the content you are learning may not appear on the exam, it further fortifies your understanding on how different concepts interlink with each other, strengthening this basis will only make you score higher. On a year-to-year basis, the difficulty of the exams fluctuates (for example, this years bio exam was extremely difficult), you want to prime yourself so you can adapt if VCAA decide to pump out another hard exam.
Hope this helps!
