Below is a link to a New Zealand expert on study skills and exam tips. This first page is on stress management.
Exam hints
NCEA Exam hints
- Know and understand the key concepts
- Quantity of answers takes away from quality: be succinct, plan you answers
- Candidates who wrote less but put their time into considering what the question asked for, and then planning their responses, achieved higher grades.
- Answer all the questions
- Answer all the bullet points
- Spot trends and patterns in data and information; quote data to support your answer
- Be prepared for questions that are set in a context. (Examples) – this may not be familiar to you, so use the resource material – there will be hints!!! Use general the concepts you know about
AS9160: The focus of this achievement standard is on evolutionary patterns and processes that lead to speciation and not relationships between plants and animals.
Evolutionary relationships are likely to relate to co-evolution, divergence, convergence and natural selection. Answers should be based on evolutionary principles and the ability to analyse, evaluate, compare and contrast outcomes based on the information provided.
Allopatric and sympatric speciation
Reproductive isolation
Understand the concepts of genetic drift and gene flow, which by association includes founder effect and bottlenecks. Candidates should be using these concepts within their responses. Some candidates display a lack of basic geographical awareness of New Zealand and the South Pacific. As many New Zealand examples are used as resources in this achievement standard, it is advantageous to spend a small amount of time focusing on candidates' basic awareness of the geography of the area, especially for those who are less familiar with New Zealand.
Human evolution: what not to do!!!
Candidates who were assessed as Not Achieved for this standard lacked some or all of the skills and knowledge required for the award of Achievement. They commonly: • confused Homo habilis tool culture with that of later hominins • were unable to describe the shape of Oldowan tools • wrote, in detail, about structures not associated with the question • wrote about changes in structures, but did not describe them • misidentified parts of the skull 6 • did not recognise Homo sapiens as modern humans • confused the terms dispersal with diverging, and inbreeding with interbreeding • failed to recognise that gene flow leads to genetic similarities and that a lack of gene flow leads to divergence.