How to help your students study for their semester finals

Note to individual students who are not in a class: I’ve written what’s below for teachers. But if you’re using Learn-Biology.com as a study guide or supplement, just follow the instructions below…and then CRUSH it on your semester final. 

If you’re giving a semester 1 final, here are some tips about how to guide your students to use our resources optimize their review sessions.

Our cumulative MCQs, FRQs, Flashcards, and Click on challenges are linked off of our AP Bio Exam review menu. I’ll use the MCQs as an example of how to set these up for effective review, and your students can repeat this same set up for our other quizzes.

Once your students login to our MCQs, they’ll see our question-picker menu.

Let’s say that you’re following our suggested curriculum, and your semester 1 final is going to cover Units 1, 2, 3, 4 and the first half of unit 6.

Instruct your students to set the question-picker to what’s shown below.

Note a few things

1. I’ve selected all of units 1 – 4 (outlined in red).
2. I opened up unit six so that I could select just the top 4 topics (outlined in blue).
3. I set the number of questions for this session to 30 (outlined in green).

This last step is super-important. The way our quizzes work is that if you get it wrong, the question goes back into the stack of questions, and will be repeated. The quiz doesn’t end until you’ve answered each question correctly. So setting the question number to a reasonable number is essential for students to get to mastery.

That’s it. You can check your students work in our teacher portal. Remember that for FRQs and flashcards, the “grading” is on the honor system. Students decide whether they’ve mastered the card or the FRQ: they’ll need coaching (and probably a bit of motivation) from you about what mastery really means (and what the consequences are of faking it).