How do you deal with the uncertainty of what you have learnt from a textbook to the IB Markscheme?

[jason_lee121]

Ok so the question might sound quite confusing but I'll explain. 

 

I get somewhat worried when I am studying a concept in biology from textbook, and the wording of that concept from the textbook will not match up too well with the mark scheme for a particular question. 

 

It's never actually happened to me yet in an internal school exam because we have access to questionbank and I normally study using those markschemes, but I often see situations where if I didn't have the access to the mark schemes, and I learnt a concept entirely from a textbook, that I would end up getting maybe 6/8 for a particular question, even if what I wrote was word-for-word from the textbook. 

 

I get that IB biology is quite difficult since IB wants us to fully grasp the topics in the syllabus and fully understand them, instead of just memorizing words according to a syllabus statement, but I guess this has just something I have been thinking about for a while. 

 

My exams are in November 2015 (this year) and like every year, there will be questions that have never been asked before on the exam. For these questions, since there is no access to the mark scheme for them (obviously), I get worried that I will lose a lot of marks in them, because of the resource that I used to study it. 

 

So really what I'm asking is how do I deal with this? Is the difference between a textbook and the mark scheme not big enough to make a difference? Am I just being paranoid? 

 

Thanks 

[anotheribkid]

I understand where you're coming from. Sometimes they'll have stuff in their mark schemes that I wouldn't have considered writing if I was studying just from the book. I usually don't even use the book unless it's something that I really don't understand. The key to picking up those points without reviewing mark schemes beforehand is to look at the number of marks available and basing your response on that i.e. if its worth 4 points, make sure you include 4 aspects to your answer to get those marks. Bioninja is also quite useful in this because they use mark schemes to base their information off of.