A Level Biology
Revision Guide

A level biology is one subject taught from several different specifications. The Department for Education sets eight areas of content every board must cover, and leaves each board to choose the order, the examples and the required practicals. This guide is those eight areas, in the DfE’s own order, with the assessment rules Ofqual sets around them, both quoted word for word. Where an area holds two big ideas it takes two pages, so the eight areas run to fourteen. No paper numbers, no component names and no mark totals appear anywhere in it, so it holds whichever specification you are sitting.

Two parts of the DfE’s document are easy to miss and are marked heavily. The first is the practical side: Appendix 5 on working scientifically and Appendix 5c, which names the apparatus and techniques you are expected to use. The second is mathematics, which Ofqual says must be at least ten per cent of the marks in biology, and which has four pages of its own here: averages, spread and uncertainty, the statistical tests, tables, charts and curves, and units, logarithms, graphs and shapes.

The DfE prints AS content in normal type and the content that is A level only in bold. The guide counts them and says which is which: forty-two points across the eight areas, twenty-three AS and nineteen A level only, and every point it quotes carries an AS or an A level tag, so you can see what is yours to learn whichever qualification you are sitting.

Every number in it is worked out by the code that draws the figure beside it, and checked before the guide is built. The percentage change in the potato cores and the concentration at which it crosses zero come from the cores’ masses; the enzyme’s rate comes from its times; the standard deviation, the t statistic and the chi-square are calculated along with their critical values rather than read off a table; and the 3:1 and 9:3:3:1 are counted off the cells of the Punnett squares. It is built around pictures rather than paragraphs, with worked examples you can follow line by line.

Written to

The DfE’s GCE AS and A level subject content for biology, chemistry, physics and psychology (April 2014), Appendix 1 for the content, Appendix 5 and 5c for the practical skills and apparatus, and Appendix 6a for the mathematics, with Ofqual’s GCE subject level conditions and requirements for science (Ofqual/16/6013), quoted word for word; no board’s specification, no paper or component names, and no claim about which practicals your board sets

Intended for

A level biology students revising the whole course, and for teachers to set as revision or use in lessons

Extent

22 pages · 22 sections