OCR runs two A-Level Biology specifications. This guide is Biology A, H420. The other is Biology B, Advancing Biology, H422, and its content is organised completely differently.

The code is printed on your exam timetable and on the front of most endorsed textbooks. If yours says H422 you need the Biology B guide instead.

Yes. The guide is cut into 26 sections across the six modules, 151 subtopics, 1,833 questions. Module 2 Foundations in Biology holds six of those sections, Module 5 holds seven and Module 6 holds six.

Module 1 has its own section, Practical Skills and Mathematical Requirements, with 104 questions on apparatus, uncertainty, presenting data, gradients and logarithmic scales, and the statistical tests.

No. The Endorsement is Component 04, assessed by your teacher across the two years and reported as Pass or Not Classified alongside your grade. It is not examined on a paper.

The Module 1 content that is examined on the written papers is in the guide in full, because practical skills questions appear on all three components.

Unified Biology draws on all six modules in one 1 hour 30 minute paper. Holding six modules at once is a recall problem before it is a technique problem, and the guide is the whole course in one file, so a synoptic round is a pass over every section rather than a hunt through six sets of notes.

About twenty minutes for one subtopic, all three steps. Subtopics run from 8 to 23 questions, median 12.

Sections vary a lot in size. Communication and Homeostasis is 32 questions across 3 subtopics. Cloning and Biotechnology is 120 across 10. Work by subtopic and the size of the section stops mattering.

Write. You write the paper by hand, so handwriting is one of the four conditions the method matches deliberately, and step 2 only works written out because that is where the wording is corrected.

The method page sets out the evidence on this.

OCR A-Level Biology A is linear, so everything is examined at the end of Year 13. The two common patterns are to work each subtopic in the week it is taught, or to start a first full pass in the January of Year 13 and run returns from there.

The guide covers the full two years from the first day of Year 12, so there is nothing to wait for.

Yes. The method puts the specification into memory. Past papers train what you do with it: reading unseen data, structuring an extended answer, working to the clock. OCR publishes them free.

One subtopic by the method, then one past-paper question on that subtopic, is the division that works.

Start with the modules on whichever component went worst. Component 01 is Modules 1, 2, 3 and 5. Component 02 is Modules 1, 2, 4 and 6. Both carry 37 per cent, so the arithmetic on where to spend time is straightforward. The full paper breakdown is here.

A PDF, emailed on purchase. Print it or work from a screen with a notebook beside you. The questions for a section print together and the answers for that section follow directly after them, so covering the answers is a matter of not turning the page.

A PDF of 1,833 exam-style questions covering the whole of OCR A-Level Biology A, with the answers printed after each section.

It is not a textbook and does not teach content for the first time. It is the tool for moving content that has already been taught into memory, and for proving whether it went in.

There should be handwritten answers on paper, and there should be three passes over the same questions. If there is no writing, the method is not being done.

The method produces its own measurement: the number right on the first closed-book pass and the number right on the third. Asking for those two numbers is a better question than asking how long they revised.

The most common revision activities are rereading notes and highlighting. Dunlosky and colleagues reviewed ten techniques against the evidence in 2013 and rated both low utility. Rereading raises how familiar a page feels without raising the ability to produce the content with the page shut, which is what the exam asks for.

The method page sets out what the alternative is and the research behind it.

£8.00 for the whole specification. An endorsed OCR A-Level Biology textbook is usually £30 to £40, and covers one of the two years.

Find the specification code. OCR runs Biology A (H420) and Biology B (H422) and they are different courses with different content. The code is on the exam timetable and on the front of most textbooks. This guide is H420.

151 subtopics at roughly twenty minutes each is about 50 hours for a full first pass. Spread across Year 13 that is under two hours a week, and the returns afterwards are three to five minutes each.

Past papers, which OCR publishes free, and their own notes or textbook for anything not yet taught. Nothing else is required to run the method.

With Module 2, Foundations in Biology. It is assessed on all three components and the rest of the course assumes it. After that, whichever module their next assessment covers.