2024 A level Biology & Chemistry Predicted Papers – TRANSCRIPT

Let’s start with… what are the TT Predicted Papers?

So, we have chosen real past paper questions. All our Predicted Papers are exam board specific. Obviously they’re a prediction of what we think is gonna come up in your exam.

How do we formulate the Predicted Papers? How does TT go about doing this? Well, let me show you some things within the Tailored Tutors Academy.

First of all, you are probably familiar with our regular pages and our Topic Revision Packs.

So let’s just choose a topic, I’m gonna demonstrate with a biology topic here on our Topic Revision Packs.

We have for a specific subtopic, we have topics and we have skills. So we are thinking about papers with a lot of detail here.There are other factors to consider, but we’ve categorized every single question from every single published paper.

Here I’m demonstrating with AQA, with a list of topics and a list of skills that match your specification. Now. So this is where it begins with every single paper from every single year, every single question getting analyzed.

We are then using that to build our background frequency analysis. So this, all our Predicted Papers begin with ranking topics and lessons into how likely are they to come up in a standard year.

Not all topics are equal, so you have a huge swing in topic importance between some topics which are not very important, (does not mean they’re not gonna come up, but not very important) vs. other topics which are massively important. Then what do we do?

We look at this year’s paper, or the most recent paper and the paper before that and occasionally 3 years back. And we are gonna then look at all the different ways that we look at a paper. So that will be by topic, it will be by skill, it will be by question type, may even be by command word.

It might be by the types of graph questions that have been asked. It might be the way that they’ve presented data to us.

So we can analyze the paper, not just by topic and not just by skill, but all these other dimensions. And then we can say, okay, well they have asked a double y axis graph question. They come up approximately 1 year in 3, and that came up last year. I think that’s less likely than normal to appear on the exams this year.

Or we take an uncommon topic, which is not very commonly asked, but it hasn’t come up in the last 3 years in a row. And so we can say, well, it’s actually much more likely than normal to appear on this year’s papers.

So just to give you a little idea here, so this again, I’m just showing for AQA topic analysis. We have the topics for the AQA biology course. We can look at all papers ever. We can look at all the AS papers there, but we can look at all the A level papers there.

But I can then subdivide by AS Paper 1, AS Paper 2, A Level Paper 1, A Level Paper 2, A Level Paper 3, and I can see the frequency with which all topics come up.

Now this is a pretty rough analysis with just topic by topic, but I can also then rank things, in, in different layers.

Where’s my, frequency analysis over here?

So we, again, we’ve like analyzed questions by writing skills and the subcategories within writing skills, evaluating results. It might be diagram interpretation, image interpretation. It might be dual axis graphs, like I was just mentioning as an example there.

And then all of the lessons as well as, and basically all this data here across all the different papers across all of background of time shows us how likely we think things are to come up. And then we modify that based upon the most recent couple of years papers to shuffle questions either up that frequency order or down that frequency order and to make sure that we have a covering of all the essential macro skills that are involved in the paper.

One of the papers that I’ve looked at and I’ve pulled basically all the topics and all the lessons in here, I then looked at, in this case, on this sheet, I’ve got the 2022 and the 2023 papers. And every time a certain thing has come up, I have then said, how many marks is that thing worth? I’ve then essentially totaled up the number of marks on each of those things and then decided whether that, how that is gonna adjust the ranking of those different topics.

And I obviously, I’ve used the color coding system here. I can then see how many marks have come up on a specific topic, what the ranking of that topic was, whether it’s more likely or less likely than normal, and if so by how much.

The last thing I’m gonna show you here in terms of, how you can sort of visually, how I visually see the different frequencies with which topics come up is we build like a heat map like this. So again, we’ve got all the topics and the lessons down the left hand side, um, and you’ve got how many times each of those things come up with the means, mediums, modes. I can calculate the standard deviations, so how variable they are.

And you can see here that just looking in biology, that there’s a lot of 0’s here. Just look how much doesn’t come up on the exam. Biology predictions especially, where you have so much content and so little of it is examined each year, makes predictions a bit risky despite all of the work that goes into building the most heavily analyzed papers that anyone has ever done.

No, no one, I am confident, no one has ever done so much work to analyze the papers as we have done.

There’ll be a Paper 1, a Paper 2, and a Paper 3 in Set A and then there will be on Monday the 22nd of April, so 3 weeks later, there will be the Set B papers.

This year we’re doing 2 sets of papers. There’ll be 2 Paper 1’s, 2 Paper 2’s, and 2 Paper 3’s. So that will give you a grand total of 6 Predicted Papers. So it just allows us more flexibility for the question types and styles.