I’d like to self study for the SAT II Bio test. I’ve taken a bio class but that was three years ago in freshman year and I forgot like 99% of it. How can I self study for the test, though? Should I just go rote in the textbook or just use the prep guide?
Princeton Review has pretty much everything you need to know; just be diligent and do all of the like exercises at the end of each review chapter, and maybe get more practice tests as it only has two…
Barron’s!
Ok, I used both Barron’s and Princeton Review. PR was forced because that was the only book that my Bio teacher wanted us to use for my Sat II prep after-school. Like always, Barron’s is always harder than the test itself and PR is a bit easier than the actual but there are some things in both books that I never encountered on the test. For example, in PR there would be this lab where you have to determine what type of amino acids does this petri dish have and the method how they do it is by looking what amino acid is missing in what strain. Also, I didn’t encounter behavior like classical conditioning (which was in both books). Keep in mind though, that if you hear people saying that they didn’t see this topic or that topic is total bs, ignore them. You should still study all of the topics no matter what.
Another thing, try skipping questions, and only guess if you guts are telling you to do so (I learned this the hard way). Also, read the questions carefully and even though you are on a time limit, missing one important word will lead you to the wrong answer. I will try to tell everyone what is something that is always on the test but people (who I knew) rarely studied for it. It’s evolution and its contents. I thought that evolution was something that was going to be on the E section or something that is going to be common sense but nope. You need to know terms like genetic drift, divergent and convergent evolutions, etc… Barron’s has some diagrams but their descriptions, imo, are ambiguous and I had no clue on what to answer for those kind of question. My teacher said that you should know your strength and weaknesses and like again I learned it the hard way. Genetics, to be more specific like Punnett squares and pedigrees were my main weaknesses. I tried asking my friends and bio teacher on how to solve these type of questions because I didn’t know how to properly solve them, albeit their thorough explanations would be sufficient enough for anyone to understand. For example, there would be this question about which two wolves was the homozygous dominant (and you had to find it with the amount of cubs born either white or gray).
Sorry for going off on a tangent, those were my experiences and stuff. I personally would recommend Barron’s with a textbook. Try asking your school if you can borrow their highest or high level biology course book so you can take notes or learn things that the review book was a bit vague about. Finally, I learned that a review book is not a textbook. There are going to be errors no matter what edition you have and in order to clarify or simply learn something always have a textbook or something that is reliable at your hands. There are also some practice questions online like MyMax (or something in that context).
Forgive me for any grammatical errors and that this is really long post. I wanted to give anything that comes out from my brain lol. Hope this helps! ~ Freshman who took the test this June, M with 640 (retaking this Oct lol).